The world is evolving, and companies today have to keep pace with the changing landscape of customer preferences, environmental developments that are affecting business decision making, political instabilities and much more. Technology that worked for you a decade ago, may not yield the same results today.
Chances are, over the years, your business has grown in different ways. Its needs would have needed to evolve based on the dynamic ecosystem that it operates in. If a lot of processes that you use today are manual to keep up with these changes, there is a good possibility that the systems you are using are out of date. It is likely that you may not have had the people or systems in place to have your technology keep up with your business processes. However, today, cloud solutions make it easy to streamline both your technology and processes at a fraction of what they would have cost in the past, making your outdated technology not just inefficient but also more expensive to maintain. By upgrading from legacy software, you open yourself to a whole new world of connectivity, efficiency and reliability that the latest software provides.
Updated technology brings with it additional benefits, such as being able to hire employees that prefer to work with companies that offer the latest technology to enable them to do their jobs more efficiently. If your company deals with customer data, having updated data protection solutions are critical to be able to serve your customers without compromising their data. Most importantly, updated technology also enables you to get real time data to make real time decisions so you can manage your business proactively, instead of reactively to data that is potentially outdated and incorrect by the time you get access to it.
When is it time to upgrade?
The need for legacy software migration may not look apparent. Here are some indicators that can show you how it is time for a change:
Your internal systems are not accessible from anywhere at anytime: If your internal systems lack the ability to be accessed from anywhere at anytime as has become evident with the new work from home reality in 2020. A legacy migration, therefore, becomes necessary to not just grow your business, but even to operate it. Employees can perform better when your systems enable them to work from anywhere.
You anticipate business growth: If you are anticipating business growth, your technology has to be able to support the enhanced demands that will be made of it to ensure business continuity.
Your productivity has gone down: Often, it is not your competitors but your slow processes and associated downtime that make you uncompetitive. If your systems are slowing down internal processes, hampering output, not giving to access to real time data, or even making your employees feeling unproductive, it is time to consider newer and smarter technological upgrades.
Software maintenance costs are adding up: Like any other machinery, your legacy system also needs periodically maintenance. But, the cost of the maintenance of your legacy software should not be a recurring expense that you need to make on a regular basis. If it is, and feels like an unnecessary expenditure that is not improving the productivity of your processes, chances are your software has lived past its shelf life. Further, outdated applications hamper data security effectiveness. Data breaches can hurt a company’s reputation and lose your precious customer base that is always sensitive about how a company treats their personal information.
Taking all these factors into consideration, the cost of not upgrading your legacy software could far outweigh the investment you need to make in new technology. If you have been deferring upgrading your legacy software because you believe it is a costly and time-consuming process, you should consider that the benefits to the business could far outweigh the costs of this change.
