Are Legacy IT Systems Holding Your Digital Business Back?

People today expect great digital experiences, whether they’re at dinner or at the bank. While changing consumer behavior is driving the digital disruption, businesses are realizing the potential of company-wide Digital Transformation (DX).

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Hallmarks of Digital transformation
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On-demand access to data: On-demand access and real-time data availability that enables data sharing across all business functions is the foundation of digital transformation. Analytics and Business Intelligence rely on this data to make data-driven decisions and deliver better customer experiences.

Increased Collaboration & communication: Teaming is the new way of working. Collaboration and communication technologies are making this the efficient and preferred way of working for the digitally-savvy generation of workers.

Intelligent automation: Automation of business processes and mundane repetitive tasks, has been the biggest source of efficiency and productivity for organizations. Automation has made room for strategic digital transformation projects across all business functions.

Improved Visibility: Breaking down fragmented business silos to gain greater end-to-end visibility into all business operations has led to a better diagnosis of problems and commissioning of accurate solutions.

To gain from DX, businesses need to let go of their legacy IT systems and embrace new and improved technologies that are better suited to enable digital businesses. Legacy systems still remain the biggest obstacles for digital transformation in enterprises.

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Legacy lockdown

Legacy systems weren’t built with the foresight to support the new digital behavior and ways of work. Old legacy systems don’t integrate well with new advanced technologies that improve efficiencies and add business value. Trying to use incompatible tools that don’t work well together can fail your digital transformation initiatives.  

Code-heavy legacy systems are expensive to maintain and complex to modify. They make it hard to stay ahead of changing market dynamics, given how long it takes to develop and release new functionalities.

Stand-alone legacy systems lock up data in silos hindering agile business changes. Access to real-time and on-demand data is a distant dream with the architecture of legacy systems. Multiple queries and transactions can cause data getting tied up in processing for days, making visibility into all business areas and data-driven decisions nearly impossible.

Reduced security is a major cause for concern with legacy systems. Legacy systems are no longer supported by most security tools. The lack of native security features and security patches for legacy systems make them an easy target for hackers. Compliance standards like GDPR, SOC etc. also make legacy systems unsuitable for the digital era.

Lastly, legacy systems are not digital-ready for next generation business technologies like AI, ML and mobile-first digital strategies that will accelerate digital transformation.

 

Letting go of legacy IT systems

So, how can organizations overcome the legacy system obstacle?

A good place to start is to provide the right digital systems and technologies. Cloud technologies offer advanced digital capabilities and efficiencies at scale for a fraction of all the costs incurred with legacy systems. Trading your legacy IT system that you painstakingly implemented and configured to serve your yesteryear business needs, is not an easy decision, but an important one to survive and thrive in the digital era.

 

We’ve put together a list of 5 signs it’s time to change your IT service desk.

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