The accelerating pace of technology change is forcing IT decision-makers to adopt new strategies that keep their existing technology investments from becoming a drag on business value ...

The accelerating pace of technology change is forcing IT decision-makers to adopt new strategies that keep their existing technology investments from becoming a drag on business value.

At the same time, companies are still getting substantial value from systems they have invested in for the last 10-20 years. So they need to proactively plan and manage the lifespan of their investments by both optimizing their existing assets and adopting next generation solutions.

Legacy systems often don’t support cloud, virtualization and/or mobility. They also often lack sufficient compliance and security characteristics.

In addition, IT organizations often don’t have the skills necessary to integrate with legacy systems with current technologies.

As a result, those systems can limit IT’s ability to resource-efficiently fulfill the relentlessly evolving needs of the business.

An IDC white paper, sponsored by CA Technologies outlines how this issue of accelerated obsolescence can be addressed by an Engage, Extend, Evolve strategy:

- Technology lifecycle experts engage in a proactive assessment of existing investments and take appropriate measures necessary to enable continued value and avoid legacy “drag.”

- Those measures include initiatives that extend the usefulness and value of technologies in their mature phase by upgrading to new versions or adding capabilities to address new requirements.

- Those measures also include initiatives that evolve IT so that technologies past their prime can be transformed or migrated to next-gen solutions—facilitated by automation, where possible, in order to mitigate risks and costs.

According to the IDC paper: “With ever-accelerating technological change, it is tempting to over-focus on ‘what’s new’ and downplay the importance of stable in-place solutions that often supply critical business functions. When such solutions are based on mature or even late stage technologies, IT organizations are faced with real challenges as to how to support and prolong usefulness—including updates and modernization—while planning for eventual transition to newer technologies and operational environments.”

“IT decision-makers are facing some hard choices as they try to shift the allocation of their finite resources from low-value ‘keep-the-lights-on’ tasks to high-impact business innovation,” said Sid Kumar, VP, Customer Lifecycle Solutions, CA Technologies. “This IDC white paper underscores how important the resolution of legacy systems issues can be in this struggle — and shows that there are practical ways to address the challenge.”