In a modern business ecosystem, technology has stopped being only a support department to become the backbone of organizations. However, many companies still operate on the mentality of “if it’s working, don’t mess with it”. What many managers don’t perceive is that maintaining old systems generate what we can call the invisible cost of obsolete IT.
This article explores how the remaining in legacy structures drains rentability and how the strategic modernization is not an expense, but one of the most drivers of Return Over Investment (ROI) for your company.
If a staff member loses 15 minutes a day waiting for the system to load or restarting an old machine, at the end of the year, a company with 100 employees loses thousands of hours of productive time.
This is a “friction” that can be caused by obsolescence. It’s a salary paid for a time that didn’t generate value.
Old equipment fails with a lot more frequency. The cost of maintaining an old server is a lot more superior than a new one.
The old hardware doesn’t still have the same availability as before, and due its rarity, the prices have risen, even for a used piece of equipment.
The obsolete IT is the favorite gateway of cybercriminals and softwares that doesn't receive updates are easy targets. A hacker can easily access and spread viruses across an outdated network system.
The cost of a data breach doesn’t only involve data recovery or loss, but also heavy fines resulting from GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) for companies that want to work accordingly.
The newer generation of professionals expect efficient and easy tools to work with. It is normal to get frustrated when working with a bureaucratic and slow system, leading to turnover.
Furthermore, employees can end up using unauthorized personalized tools (Shadow IT), leading to new security risks. It can be dangerous as the company does not have the certainty of how security works on these external tools, given that staff members can store confidential data on them.
While your competitors use real-time data analysis and artificial intelligence to make decisions, your company may be stuck trying to extract a simple report in a legacy database.
The incapacity to innovate quickly is the greatest cost a business can have. The tools to do it already exist and the insistence on using obsolete IT can block the ways of doing it.
To elaborate and present a project of modernization to your company’s manager, it’s important to speak how the business can lower the expenses by investing in the right places. The return over investment calculation should consider:
Old servers can be replaced by cloud computing that can store and keep the company systems live without needing a physical place and actual hardware to do it. In this way, it is possible to integrate and automate the already existing system with modern API and tools to automatize processes.
It is important to make sure modernization will be guided with a strategic mind and not to follow technological trends. In this scenario, the modernization could not work as intended, leading to more bottlenecks as implemented.
The modernization can start by making simple questions:
Identifying what problems the company is facing can help choosing how to start it and what you can get from doing it.
The cost of maintaining an old system is silent, but lethal for competitiveness at long range. Investing in modernization has the necessary foundation to support the demand increase and a more digital and instantaneous seek for solution.
If your company is facing losses by system crashes and keeps maintaining old hardware, it’s the right time to start modernizing.