Despite the fact that mission-critical applications and data still reside on legacy systems, organisations have to start leaving legacy behind if they want to be competitive and agile in future.
This is according to Paul McGovern, regional sales manager, Middle East and Africa at BMC, who was speaking ahead of a BMC and AWS webinar on fast tracking digital evolution.
McGovern says legacy infrastructure and systems are still widely in use. “They are everywhere. Many organisations in South Africa still operate in a mainframe or client/server architecture for their core business processes and functions.”
However, legacy infrastructure and systems directly impact customer experience and ultimately inhibit business scalability and growth, he says.
“Legacy systems are notoriously inflexible and act as an obstacle for the majority of businesses operating in today’s digital environment.
“Improving efficiencies and capabilities in order to remain competitive is a central goal of every digital transformation strategy. Customers expect organisations to be digitised, and executives see digital transformation as a means to be competitive. By not investing in new technology and sticking with legacy infrastructure and systems, businesses are hampering their ability to compete and are ultimately giving ground to the competition.”
McGovern says organisations have to start moving beyond legacy and migrating to cloud to future-proof their operations.
Legacy systems are notoriously inflexible and act as an obstacle for businesses operating in today’s digital environment.
Paul McGovern, BMC
“Shifting business processes and functions that are critical to customer engagement to a new architecture is often a time-consuming and expensive, but necessary effort. In fact, in a 2017 survey conducted by VMware, it was found that 62% of IT leaders say that legacy systems are the biggest roadblock to multi-cloud success," he says. "The need to move towards a customer experience architecture in as fast and agile a way as possible is one of the primary reasons that organisations are moving to cloud platforms.”
However, McGovern cautions against trying to digitise everything at once in an effort to modernise. “Businesses should in fact focus on aspects of their organisation that can be upgraded and that give the best ROI possible,” he says.
Catching up to Cloud webinar
BMC and AWS, in partnership with ITWeb, will host a webinar on 14 October, around cloud migration, overcoming legacy infrastructure dependencies, and security and compliance in the cloud.
For more information, and to register for the Catching up to Cloud webinar, go to https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/bmc-catching-up-to-cloud/
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