How do you build a compelling business case for phasing out legacy tech?
Cost saving is an add-on benefit in some cases.
Think of legacy infrastructure and applications like pulling money out of a 401K account. You pull out 1000 and pay it back over 2 years. You paid back the 1000, that's great, but what did you lose, you lost the interest created and the compounding of that interest over the remaining lifetime of your 401K account. This is money you'll never earn.
Having critical resources allocated to something that's just "keeping the lights on" vs. some or all of those people being focused on activities (coding, learning, sharing, building, etc., etc) that further the mission and vision of the enterprise is a lost opportunity that you'll never reap the rewards from.
Can you use the legacy tech another day? Can you use it for another week? What about another month? And how about another year?
It is a similar problem as the frog in the boiling pot of water. The danger is the slow slide of decline over time versus stark failure. Put that in perspective with priorities in any given year and legacy tech often falls below the water line.
If you have clear cost advantages or features with value in business terms, that is great. Unfortunately, most legacy tech does not have that opportunity. Therefore the business case is much harder and complicated to navigate. Identifying risks, value and cost avoidance can help. Engaging a cross-functional team to understand and buy-in the problem is key.
Old technology that should have been retired, and was scheduled to be retired, was hacked before it was retired.
A project that would have cost perhaps $500,000; ended up exceeding $100 million in fines, legal fees, bad PR, and more.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/09/14/equifax-hack-the-result-of-patched-vulnerability
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Limited environment/Infrastructure resources31%
Inability to quickly identify the root cause of CI/CD pipeline failures45%
Lack of standardized CI/CD pipeline templates across the organization53%
Integrating security tools - inefficient security implementation leading to false positives38%
Poor communication across business and product teams/coordination challenges26%
Cost/resource management26%
Implementation of CI/CD into on-going projects and workflows22%
Internal resistance: training issues, culture, etc.14%
Inefficient implementation of CI/CD due to lack of expertise, poor training, etc.19%
Poorly written unit and acceptance testing9%
We are not doing regression testing10%
25% manual, 75% automated50%
50% manual, 50% automated28%
100% manual, 0% automated8%
Don't know2%
Start with trying to get as detailed cost of support information as possible, including human cost and hardware cost etc. Hopefully those costs are high enough to migrate to new tech and still show savings.