Overview
To help you reach the highest results, your software should correspond to your business needs. It’s obvious that even if your applications developed 10 or 20 years ago are still functional, they can’t fully reflect the new reality and can act as a barrier to your business growth. But it doesn’t mean that building a new app is the only possible solution. Software migration can become the most adequate strategy in your case. Over the years of our work, we’ve seen a lot of cases when migration to newer technology versions helped companies to optimize their IT budgets, increase their productivity and significantly improve the profitability of their businesses. In this blog post, we’d like to tell you more about the benefits of software migration and the issues that you may face if you decide not to modernize your legacy apps.
Problems with legacy software
Based on the experience of our clients, we can define the most widespread pains that act as a motivator for businesses to start considering software migration to a newer technology version.
- Old-fashioned interfaces. Despite the fact that many companies prefer to focus on the functionality of their software instead of its visual part, we need to admit that the look of your app also matters, especially when it is intended for an external audience. Some customers who turned to us with a request to migrate their apps noted that they had started to lose their clients because their apps looked old-fashioned and the navigation seemed to be rather confusing.
- High maintenance costs. Many companies note that every month they allocate a huge part of their budget for supporting and maintaining their obsolete software. Due to these constantly growing expenses, they simply do not have the possibility to invest in innovations and the modernization of existing tools. Such an approach to budget allocation has a negative impact on business efficiency and profitability.
- A growing number of bugs and downtimes of the whole system. Rather often it comes out as an unpleasant surprise for many companies. But even one low-performance obsolete app with unsolved technical issues can become a reason for downtimes, slowdowns, and repetitive restarts of the entire software system.
- Incompatibility with new technologies. When businesses want to integrate new tools and services into their existing apps, they need to make sure they are compatible with their software. But if you still use an app built 15 years ago, the risks that you won’t be able to integrate modern tools are very high. As a result, your app may lack important functionality.
- Decrease in business competitiveness. Among our customers, there are a lot of companies that have decided to migrate their software because they started to realize that they are losing their market position and market share due to problems with their business apps. When the market conditions are changing, you need to make sure that your software corresponds to these updates, otherwise, it won’t be surprising that your clients will prefer the services of your rivals to yours.
What can happen if you choose not to migrate your legacy software?
The key negative effects that can result from the use of obsolete software:
- Lack of qualified experts. The labor IT market is very dynamic. Young specialists try to focus on the latest and most innovative technologies in order to meet market demands and to gain skills that will be relevant not only today but also in the future. It means that with the time flow it usually becomes more and more challenging to find experts who can work with tools and technologies that were popular a decade ago. As a result, situations when companies can’t find developers who can update or support their obsolete apps are not rare.
- Security vulnerabilities. Software obsolescence makes it practically impossible to ensure its security. Due to old security standards that were used for building your apps, they can become easy prey for hackers, put the confidentiality of your business data under threat, and lead to financial and reputational losses.
- Lower performance. Legacy systems need more time for performing various tasks than new software and require more support and maintenance effort. The use of old tools can lead to the loss of time and prevent your staff from fulfilling their everyday job responsibilities.
- Data damage or loss. Obsotele software can often fail due to various errors, start reloading and closing windows without any actions from the side of a user. As a result, valuable data can be lost. Moreover, old apps may have issues with working with growing business data volumes.
Benefits of software migration
Before you make a decision on the necessity to migrate your software, you need to make sure that you clearly understand what you will get after the successful migration. Our clients typically mention the following changes:
- Seamless support and maintenance;
- Smaller expenses on app updates and introduction of new features;
- Overall optimization of IT budget;
- Higher security and better data protection;
- Competitive UI/UX design;
- Better scalability;
- Possibility to integrate migrated solutions with other corporate software;
- Higher system productivity;
- Faster tasks performance;
- Ability to innovate quicker;
- Increased user engagement and satisfaction.
Closing word
When our clients come to us, we never offer them a solution just immediately. We need to analyze each case in particular in order to estimate the feasibility of each approach to working with the obsolete software. Though there are a lot of benefits of migrating legacy apps to newer technology versions, sometimes it is not the best software modernization solution. That’s why we never insist on migration when we see that this step can lead to unfavorable consequences or unreasonable expenses.
