Legacy systems hogging IT skills, power and budget

In a survey of IT execs by performance improvement specialist Macro 4, 42% admitted to keeping older applications alive simply to retain access to historical data. 87% agreed that this ties up resources that could be redeployed more usefully elsewhere, but 91% believed decommissioning legacy systems was complex and costly. “Older applications can be a real support headache, because they require different skill sets and tend to be harder to pick apart when things go wrong,” comments Jeremy Harpham, document management systems product manager at Macro 4. “In many cases companies are also incurring extra overheads because they need to keep old hardware and software solely for a legacy application to run on,” he adds. IT expertise and support, mentioned by 69% of respondents, came joint top of the list of resources that managers want to reallocate. Other areas included data centre space (52%), electricity (40%), hardware (37%) and software licenses (37%). Many were dissatisfied with having to use legacy applications, with 61% stating that end users find it complex and time consuming to access. Organisations often feel forced to keep legacy systems running, says Harpham, but adds that decommissioning legacy systems and finding alternative ways of keeping the data alive does not have to be complicated. “One of the worries with any project which involves migrating data is that you might lose the data. But there are reliable alternatives out there that can take the data, index it, compress it and make it readily accessible in a number of viewing formats,” explains Harpham. “We helped npower decommission several legacy billing systems inherited through mergers and acquisitions. All the billing information for 5 million customers can now be accessed across the company very easily, from npower’s centralised customer service and billing system.”