October 27, 2022
We've all been there, whether it's outdated line-of-business applications, ancient database servers, or your legacy enterprise content management (ECM) platform--maintaining old technology is one of the most difficult challenges CIOs face.
However, at some point, the cost to maintain legacy systems becomes too onerous and their inability to adapt to ever-changing business requirements outweighs the benefits of maintaining them. Simply put, the upkeep of legacy enterprise content management systems can be exorbitant.
At this point, businesses have to consider migrating to new and contemporary ECM systems. They all come with impressive business benefits--dramatically lower capital investment, lower operating costs, speedier processes, and easier data governance. However many enterprises are reluctant because they don't want their valuable data and content to be lost or inaccessible in the process. Fortunately for businesses considering a new ECM solution, migration to a modern enterprise content management system is easier than you think.
The most obvious disadvantage of legacy systems is high costs. It is not only the exorbitant licensing fees; there are other costs which make maintaining legacy ECM systems expensive. From hiring specialists familiar with legacy ECM systems, specific IT environments and hardware needed to run the solution, to additional costs to integrate the legacy systems with other modern systems businesses use, the list goes on and on. Those are just the obvious costs. Since legacy ECM systems also make things harder for businesses to be fully compliant with data privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR, potential fine fees resulting from non-compliance are also astronomical.
Legacy ECM systems earned this label because the original vendor's technology is outdated and/or obsolete, although the services they perform are still relevant. The fact of the matter is the older an application gets, the more difficult it becomes to obtain support. Software vendors discontinue support for older products as developers move on to the next version of their product. So even though the functionality your legacy ECM application provides is still relevant for your business today, the vendor will stop supporting it in the future forcing you to migrate to a new system.
Legacy ECM systems cannot keep up with the volume, performance, and high availability requirements of modern businesses. This leads to an increase in manual labour, which inevitably creates bottlenecks and other inefficiencies. Legacy systems also pose a higher risk of data loss and security-related threats, without the ability to install patches or upgrades. As more data breaches occur at an increasing rate every year, it is becoming increasingly important to have a secure system that can adapt to changing business threats and conditions.
There is no doubt that legacy systems are based on antiquated technologies. It has become increasingly difficult to find skilled staff with training and experience required to operate and maintain such systems. This lack of experienced labour makes it difficult to find qualified people to perform maintenance and upgrades of these systems. Consequently, when problems do arise in these systems, the cost of finding help to fix them is high. The longer it takes to find qualified staff to work on them, the longer it takes to resolve them. Additionally, when IT staff does get up to speed on the technology required to run these solutions, it becomes difficult to retain them as employees as they seek out opportunities to work on more modern technologies.
The new data privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA have stricter compliance requirements when it comes to how businesses handle personally identifiable information (PII). The legacy enterprise content management platforms are not able to keep up with the new laws and it is very hard to establish or implement data security and data governance protocols to comply with the laws. Many enterprises that implemented these systems before the new laws came into effect are still struggling to meet the compliance standards today. For instance, when a customer invokes their "Right to be Forgotten" and requests for their personal data to be deleted, it is a complex technological and operational challenge for operators of legacy ECM systems to search and identify all files containing the sensitive information in order to comply with the request.
One of the cardinal principles in business is cutting costs to ensure customer satisfaction. Helix International gives you the muscles to achieve precisely that purpose.
Our proprietary software platform and managed services teams have assisted over 200 Fortune 500 companies to migrate, convert, and optimize their on-premises and cloud rollouts. Helix International has been IBM's partner of choice since 2007 and has evolved from the industry leader ECM Architects since 1994.
The Helix International MARS Migration Platform has 45 connectors and extractors for every ECM solution in existence, allowing businesses to read their data on legacy ECM systems without having to completely migrate the data to new ECM platforms.
Technical support is one of the comparative advantages of Helix International; accordingly, we deliver personalized, visionary, pre-emptive, predictive—competent support and maintenance. We believe our clientele is the number one priority.
At Helix International, we utilize our custom proprietary toolset developed over decades of enterprise ECM projects and our deep product and service subject matter experience. Help your organization today by getting in touch with our experts.
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