Legacy systems provide all manner of challenges for organisations not least the benefits of a connected enterprise cannot be obtained with old systems that will not integrate.

A legacy system is defined as a system based on either old hardware or old software standards. The most obvious image to spring to mind is of an aging mainframes and tape reels, however I reality there is no specific timeline to determine when a system has come of age. Some of the most complex legacy migrations to new platforms involve fairly recent Microsoft Access and network distributed ‘fat client’ programs.

Reasons to transition legacy systems to new platforms vary, but mostly the reasons come down to:

• Risk – Older systems tend to be difficult to impossible to find support for meaning that systems which are mission critical and required to have 100% availability pose a serious threat to the day to day operation of organisations. If the owner of the system is lucky the vendor will provide support in ‘legacy mode’, at some stage it would be expected that the vendor will reduce or remove support based on support cost becoming unviable.
• Opportunity/Cost – As a rule of thumb the older a legacy system becomes and the more data and users it accumulates the more expensive it becomes to transition.
• Improvement – Developing new features for legacy systems or integrating them into other systems is often purely economically unviable in relation to rebuilding the system on contemporary architectures and platforms.

Although the reasons to transition legacy system to new platforms are powerful so too are the perceived resistance to change by owners of the system. If there is no requirement to develop the system and the system currently works satisfactorily then the short term cost can seem high for little immediate benefit. Additionally these costs get higher for complex or monolithic applications, especially if they are undocumented or the understanding of the workings of the system has been lost in time.

The single most powerful determinate for a legacy transition can be derived from the specific benefits a new system can bring. Legacy risks aside, if capacity can be increased or costs reduced by developing new features of a system at the time of migration then there is probably an immediate business case for doing so.

Nexus can help determine what this business case might be by analysing the current systems and creating a functional scope for the next iteration of the system built on new a platform. The performance and benefits gap between the old system and the new system provides the necessary insight to provide a cost/benefit analysis of the transition.

Nexus builds applications based on cutting edge methodologies and technologies. Systems transitioned by Nexus will also benefit from open architecture that will support continual development and integration so the risk of the system becoming a legacy in itself is minimised. The Nexus Architectural Model (NAM) incorporates the best development practice that recent IT history has to offer.

Using such architectures not only allows Nexus custom applications to be integrated fully into other systems in an organisation, but also provides a platform on which to enhance and expand the functionality of those systems.

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