Legacy system migration strategies

How does the legacy migration or modernization strategy begin? Here are the common approaches that organizations take when dealing with legacy systems and the drawbacks these approaches can lead to:

1. Ripping and replacing their old systems and putting in entirely new ones: For legacy system migration, it’s difficult to justify the time and expense necessary for a rip-and-replace approach and for organizations that must pivot quickly, it can be difficult to keep business operations afloat while entirely replacing legacy systems.
2. Enabling web functionality within these systems through custom code: With this approach, data and systems are connected through point-to-point integration, so with every project an organization embarks on that involves data within a legacy system, they have to write new point-to-point code in order to expose any relevant data. This is a time-consuming legacy system approach and can lead to a brittle architecture that is composed of tightly coupled applications, making it difficult to easily retire or modernize existing systems.

Traditional architectural approaches centered around point-to-point integration are unable to address legacy migration or modernization well. Point-to-point integration also creates a dependence on specialized teams that are more familiar with these products; this creates bottlenecks and increases maintenance costs.

More importantly, point-to-point integration builds architectural brittleness over time, making organizations less flexible and adaptive to change. Organizations must move beyond these approaches and embrace a new option: APIs.

Learn the role of APIs in legacy system migration and modernization by reading our whitepaper.