Old technology stacks can be found throughout the sector, especially in companies that have been around for more than a few years. While most firms have undergone digital transformation of some kind, shedding legacy tech is no easy job and can lead people to take the path of least resistance, using a mix of old and new tech across their IT estate.
This can lead to big issues down the line. A recent example is the outage that led to thousands of flights being cancelled and delayed across the United States, which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) blamed on accidental file deletion while updating a database. The authority is heavily-reliant on old systems, and has said it will take until 2029 to phase them out.
In this episode, Jane and Rory speak to Ravi Mayuram, SVP of engineering and CTO at cloud database platform Couchbase, to discuss the challenges presented by legacy infrastructure, and why enterprises need to take the opportunity to upgrade before problems become entrenched.
Highlights
“Those systems were not built for this, they could take a downtime of a night. Nowadays it's five nines (99.999%) availability, you cannot have the systems go down for more than five seconds in a year.”
“Say you just want to take one microservice away from your legacy monolithic system to modernise it, and use other systems which will give you this, I'm using this analogy of a weight bearing wall. Which you would know in your system, how you have to sort of take the weight off of the one that you want to modernise.”
“Now, if you don't take that challenge and start the journey now, you will find yourself on the wrong side of the digital divide. You may not cross the chasm and things will pass by, or you will be completely upended.”
Read the full transcript here.
Footnotes
- Civil servants blame legacy technology for sluggish government digital transformation progress
- BT Group extends Kyndryl deal to migrate legacy mainframe apps to the cloud
- Defra's legacy software problem 'threatens' UK gov cyber security until 2030
- Managing a blend of legacy and modern IT during digital transformation
- Government 'must focus on replacing legacy IT systems'
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