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Jul
31

Legacy Application Migration
Posted at 12:09 pm | Comments (0)

LAM (Legacy Application Migration) is clearly one of the most complex IT challenges facing the IT industry today. Although there are a number of forces driving companies to migrate their Legacy Applications to .Net the overriding impetus for LAM is the need to easily address changing business demands, leverage information rich databases and future proof critical business systems in order to maintain a competitive edge in the market.

In today’s competitive business scenario, CIOs understand that LAM can significantly reduce costs through the implementation of more efficient, standardized IT systems that lower maintenance and human resource expenses.

Modernized systems also guarantee the following benefits:

• Shorter time-to-market.
• Easier application & information integration.
• Consolidation of subsystems.
• The ability to expand functionality while fully preserving corporate business knowledge.

The ROI of updated systems can be measured not only directly within the IT budget but also throughout the organization, due to increased productivity and more efficient decision making processes.

However, organisations also understand that migrating mission-critical legacy systems has the potential to become one of the IT department’s most daunting and complex tasks, as most in-house IT teams lack modernization experience. The wide range of modernization paths and tools, each with its own positive and negative business consequences, has led more and more IT executives to recognise the need for an integrated solution approach to LAM.

The growing importance of Legacy Application Migration has perpetuated a large number of terms that often confuse rather than simplify the various issues involved.

A popular misconception is that “Legacy Systems” are old and cumbersome, run on antiquated hardware and software, and continue to be used only because the costs and risks involved in replacing or redesigning them are so high. While this may be true in some cases, this definition is too narrow and is open to misinterpretation. For example, there are one, two and three year old applications, which are classed as ‘legacy’ simply because they have a successor under development.

Since Legacy Systems include all production systems and their associated data, Legacy System Migration is, simply put, the process of ensuring that Legacy Systems fully meet the enterprise’s present requirements and current technology needs.

What Drives Legacy Application Migration (LAM)?

The consideration currently given to LAM is a direct reflection of today’s business climate. Businesses require cutting-edge IT systems in order to stay ahead in a marketplace characterized by rapid change, globalization, and economies of scale, increasing competition, and diminishing margins.

While LAM can be viewed, as discussed above, as a basic and ongoing need of every IT system, more often than not, the decision to launch a modernization initiative surfaces at a critical juncture for the organisation.

The need for migration of applications or databases in enterprises arises from changes in business demands or technology challenges either to improve operational efficiency or to manage risk. Many enterprises face the challenge of ensuring that investments in legacy systems do not get locked in proprietary and outdated technologies while migrating to newer systems. The need is to preserve established business rules and practices in the old system at the same time managing valuable human resources locked in maintaining legacy systems.

The need for LAM is largely driven by;

• Maintenance problems: Complex aging architecture and the difficulty of deploying such systems
• A lack of skilled technicians to maintain the systems
• Scalability problems
• Business logic mix-up
• An inability to access, manipulate and analyse business information and data
• Integration problems with other enterprise systems
• Difficulty in adapting the system for new user requirements

With ever improvising technology LAM definitely is the need for every business house.