Risk mitigation

The important objective in this style of legacy modernisation is risk mitigation through re-use of what is known to work already; coupled to choice, going forwards. The enterprise can keep its legacy systems and maintain them in a more agile fashion, using a PC-based development environment, if that makes business sense; or move them to a new platform, perhaps if they are on a "burning platform" nearing the end of its supported life. It can even mine its legacy for business processes which can be input to the development of new software; or adopt some combination of all these approaches.

Once the legacy systems are understood, they can be emulated on a different, cheaper, more agile platform. With modern technology, it is quite feasible to change and maintain even a traditional COBOL mainframe application on the PC, and then migrate the changes back to applications running on the mainframe.

However, legacy modernisation is a serious project, involving cultural change, so it has associated risks, which must be managed. An enterprise embarking on legacy modernisation needs a modernisation process, with internal champions both in top business management and in the technical area, as well as effective risk mitigation policies.

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