To match the increasing demand of today’s market, it is critical for enterprises to revamp their legacy IT infrastructure
In the wake of digital transformation and modernization initiatives, most enterprises across industries find their legacy systems as a hurdle to agility. Without wasting any time, they need to revamp their IT infrastructure to become an agile and responsive enterprise. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the need for enterprises to implement modern technology for the rapidly changing business dynamics.
But implementing and adopting these technologies without having a strategic plan and a responsive infrastructure in place, can result in waste of modernization initiatives.
Having a clear roadmap and what steps need to be taken along the way can save time and investment. Here a few strategies IT leaders can implement to revamp their legacy IT infrastructure and accelerate their IT modernization:
Having Knowledge about existing systems
As the first steps towards revamping existing IT infrastructure, CIOs need to assess the technologies that the enterprise has at its disposal. They need to be able to identify each tool they use alongside the business objective it signifies and fulfills.
In addition, CIOs must understand how the data is flowing across the existing infrastructure to understand the importance of existing tools and technology within the organization, by investing in enterprise complexity analysis tools.
This will enable them to reduce the chances of falling for irrelevant and high cost tools that fail to deliver the required results.
Prioritizing projects based on outcomes
Enterprise IT leaders have to confront an exhaustive list of technologies that needs updating. In today’s environment of economic uncertainty, investing in projects that don’t have a higher RoI can dry up the already strained IT budget.
Therefore, investing in projects and systems that have the potential to deliver more should be the obvious choice for IT budgets.
This will help CIOs identify systems that provide the required agility, reliability, and elasticity and route the investment away from those that add no value.
Reevaluating the total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Finding the systems and technologies that can deliver a higher RoI is great, but it is only a small part of the financial calculation. CIOs must calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the existing legacy IT systems, and use that information to set priorities.
One of the best ways to assess the TCO and RoI of a legacy system is by considering the costs and risks associated with it. This helps to better understand the importance of existing systems and may also help to rethink the IT systems that were on top of the list to be discarded in favor of modern technologies.
Eliminating can deliver incredible results
Revamping shouldn’t always be about updating and integrating the latest technologies, it can also be about eliminating. CIOs can assess the existing technology stack and find out the ones that overlap in terms of capabilities.
Identifying such technologies can help enterprise leaders eradicate the technologies that are just value addition and do not support the organization’s long term goals.
No doubt revamping the legacy systems can yield significant results. However, without having a strategy in place to assess the effectiveness of the existing system, enterprises are less likely to achieve the modernization that they are striving for.
