Problems With Legacy Systems: 5 Warning Signs and 4 Fixes

Out-of-date technologies are a security risk for software businesses. Nonetheless, despite the issues with legacy systems, several firms proceed using them.

Greater than 80 percent of the worldwide organizations surveyed by VMware reported a security breach in 2020, and using outdated security technologies was one in every of the highest three reasons for the compromise.

So, why are legacy systems still used?

Common reasons include high operational value, contractual obligations, and high modernization costs.

Irrespective of why your organization uses outdated legacy systems, you may discover the warning signs of vulnerable software and implement changes to scale back risk.

The issues with legacy systems aren’t all the time obvious. You’ve probably experienced a few of these without realizing your software is in danger.

Listed below are five warning signs that indicate your traditional software needs more security:

Third-party software reduces costs of development and ownership by eliminating worries about its maintenance or updates. Nonetheless, when the software reaches End-of-Life or the seller terminates support, this convenience becomes a compliance issue.

For instance, CentOS 8 reached End-of-Life on Dec. 31, 2021, eight years ahead of its planned life cycle. This left CentOS 8 users with two options: Migrate to a brand new operating system or risk non-compliance because of an absence of software updates.

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) are a couple of frameworks that mandate using actively supported software.

Although the regulatory frameworks applicable to your software may vary, it’s likely non-compliant and liability if it uses unsupported technologies.

Do you end up going “yeah, it all the time does that” or recommending workarounds every time your software slows all the way down to a crawl or crashes out of the blue?

Limiting functionalities and implementing workarounds might get the job done for now. But they won’t tackle existing security vulnerabilities. Further, temporary fixes might result in technical debt, complicating future upgrades and introducing unknown vulnerabilities.

Waiting a couple of minutes to generate a report is predicted. But in the event you need workarounds to perform easy tasks, that’s a transparent sign that your legacy software needs modernization.

Whether it’s with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Point of Sale (POS), or Customer Relationship Management (CRM), your software would require integrations with the most recent technologies. 

But integrating legacy and modern software may require expensive workarounds. Something so simple as an absence of an API within the core can result in poor performance, integrations, and security gaps.

Legacy software can’t sustain with changing encryption standards or support integrations needed to run businesses easily. Thus, your customers usually tend to move to your competitors than wait for you to deal with the issues along with your legacy systems.

Keeping software up thus far is a resource-intensive task. While you’re working on improving functionality, fixing bugs, and attempting to sustain with the competition, it’s easy to lose track of dependencies.

It’s only whenever you upgrade a component similar to MySQLi or PHP that you just realize your codebase is stuffed with dependencies and potentially unknown risks.

Software that relies on legacy technologies similar to hardware, operating systems, and database structures can’t adopt recent technologies or implement security measures in keeping with current standards.

Legacy dependencies hurt organizational flexibility, business agility, worker productivity, and future opportunities. More importantly, they necessitate additional security.

Legacy technologies often have complex code and functionality. It may be difficult to interchange isolated components or find competent engineers to keep up the system.

Because of this, operating costs can eat into your small business capital and limit your ability to innovate or scale with demand. Furthermore, when things go mistaken, it leads to expensive downtimes that hurt each your operating budget and business popularity.

Naturally, you want to put money into maintaining your software. But when maintenance costs exceed your research and development expenses, it’s an indication that your traditional software needs more security.

When you’ve identified the issues with legacy systems, it’s time to strategize ways to secure your software. You may approach legacy system modernization to enhance security in several ways.

Here’s a fast overview of the highest 4 ways to repair the issues with legacy systems:

The best option to protect your legacy system is by limiting network access to its data and functions using a firewall. After air-gapping the software, you may expose its functions as services via API to proceed using legacy technologies with high operational value.

This strategy allows you to tackle the performance, compliance, and IT network infrastructure security issues of on-premises legacy software. Nonetheless, air-gapping is a brief fix. Encapsulating legacy technologies doesn’t address issues with maintenance or upgrades.

Rewriting the software to repair legacy dependencies might sound just like the most obvious software modernization strategy for your small business. Rewriting software, nevertheless, can quickly turn out to be an execution nightmare as you dig into old code to decipher forgotten edge use cases.

A whole rewrite is your only option if:

• The software is mission-critical, and its core framework is deprecated. 
• You’re having a tricky time finding competent staff to keep up the software. 
• The prices of maintaining the software exceed that of a rewrite.

Although rewriting allows you to reconsider functionality and implement future-proof measures, it’s an expensive endeavor that may drain your organization resources as an alternative of using those resources for adding features, product offerings, or marketing your small business. 

Rehosting your legacy software is one in every of the fastest ways to secure it and offers the bottom upfront cost and risk. It is because cloud solutions offer greater flexibility than on-site hardware solutions.

Furthermore, it gives you more options to select from based in your use case. You may either migrate your software to a public or private cloud solution.

Relocating to the public cloud offers lower costs and near-unlimited scalability. Nonetheless, you could have to refactor your code to work on the general public cloud infrastructure after data migration.

A survey by 451 Research found that controlling costs on the general public cloud was one in every of the largest challenges to adopting public cloud for small and midsize businesses. In contrast, managed private cloud offers a predictable yet cost-effective option to overcome the issues with legacy systems.

Migrating to a personal cloud allows you to leverage the flexibleness and scalability of the cloud without worrying about infrastructure security. You may proceed using your legacy software system in a secure, virtualized environment.

All you want to do is migrate your software to a hosted private cloud. Your hosting provider will handle the safety and maintenance for you post migration.

Refactoring your legacy software systems to work with the most recent technologies is a low-risk option that solves compatibility and security issues. As you refactor, you may replace parts of your software, upgrade capabilities, and even reconsider your IT architecture.

The downside of refactoring is that it’s extremely slow, needs numerous skill, and may often result in more complexities in the long term. Be sure you properly estimate refactoring costs and plan them thoroughly before you decide for this approach.

Navigating security problems with legacy systems is a never-ending challenge. Nonetheless, the signs of vulnerable software systems are easy to identify. In case your software shows any of the five warning signals we’ve listed above, it’s a transparent sign that it needs more security.

Securing a legacy system is a fancy task, and there’s nobody right option to do it. Legacy system modernization strategies vary for every business. Be sure you weigh the professionals and cons of every approach and select the very best one on your systems.