Your roadmap to sunsetting legacy systems
Explore the roadmap
The journey to modernizing legacy software systems starts here
As organizations evolve and grow, merge, or consolidate operations, the number of enterprise systems that IT departments support continues to increase. While newer systems are added, those introduced early begin to age out of support and development.
These legacy applications, while once vital, can impede productivity and increase operational costs due to outdated technology, security vulnerabilities, and lack of integration capabilities with modern systems. By retiring these obsolete software applications, organizations can redirect resources towards more strategic initiatives, enhance system performance, and reduce maintenance overhead.
Planning for the decommissioning of legacy software — sometimes referred to as sunsetting legacy systems, or Application Retirement Planning (ARP) — is becoming increasingly important for organizations aiming to streamline their IT infrastructure and optimize operational efficiency.
In a recent survey, 90% of IT decision makers said legacy systems are holding their organizations back from using digital technologies to innovate or make operational efficiencies, and more than a third believe legacy systems are a barrier to completing IT projects.
There’s never been a better time for legacy system modernization.
Why retire? Key drivers behind legacy application sunsetting
The motivations to kick off a legacy modernization process fit into two main categories:
Cost reduction
When it comes to the impact of a legacy application on your business, the most visible, ongoing factor is cost. You may or may not experience a security breach due to an outdated application—but you will experience higher costs.
High operating costs
Legacy systems come with a lot of baggage. They often require more maintenance and patching than modern alternatives, making them more difficult and costly to upkeep. They also often require customizations and integrations to ensure disparate systems can interoperate and may experience operational downtime when inevitable issues arise.
Technical debt
Legacy applications bring with them a high level of technical debt. By 2025, companies will be spending 40% of their IT budgets on simply maintaining technical debt, according to Gartner. While technical debt is a category that goes well beyond legacy applications, given that application costs can make up to 80% of the entire IT budget, retiring legacy applications can lead to substantial cost savings.
Obsolescence
The maintenance and patching we mentioned earlier? Someone needs to write the code and make the updates, and as the system ages, those people may move onto other systems — even other coding languages — and make accessing support for these obsolete technology systems more difficult and expensive.
Security risks
While we’ve considered the ongoing costs of running a legacy application, let’s turn to the potentially much greater cost of a security incident like a data breach.
Reduced oversight
Ensuring data integrity and accuracy can be challenging with older systems, impacting decision-making and operations.
Legacy systems also may lack current oversight, leaving you unaware of stored ROT, duplicate data, and sensitive data at risk. This can lead to significant dangers like data breaches, data loss, or regulatory issues. Proactive data minimization and defensible disposal is a key measure to reduce low value, at-risk data in the event of a breach or cyber-attack.
Incident costs
Older systems may have known security vulnerabilities and may not receive regular updates or patches. Threat actors may choose to target a legacy system for the sensitive data it holds or use it to gain a foothold into an organization’s network, and move to other systems or user accounts from there.
This kind of attack works against even the most sophisticated, well-resourced companies. Microsoft gave a vivid example of this threat in early 2024, when Russian state-sponsored threat actor Midnight Blizzard compromised a legacy, non-production test account at the company. With this as a foothold, the threat actor then accessed a small percentage of corporate email accounts, including members of the executive team and cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, exfiltrating emails and documents.
When legacy systems are widely used, the impact of a vulnerability is much larger. In 2020-2021, the Accellion file transfer appliance, considered legacy software by the company itself, was exploited, affecting multiple organizations and exposing sensitive data. A series of breaches at customers around the world began in late 2020 and continued into early 2021. The company had already been moving customers off the appliance, planned to end support for the appliance in April 2021, and had discontinued support for its operating system in November 2020.
According to the 2024 edition of IBM’s annual Cost of a Data Breach report, the average cost of a data breach was up 10% from 2023, up to US $4.88 million, the biggest jump since the pandemic. For US-based companies, it was worse, with an average cost of US $9.36 million per breach.
Regulatory and compliance requirements
Outdated software systems make maintaining compliance with modern security and data privacy laws like the General Data Protection Act (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), more difficult, complicating the management and protection of sensitive customer data. Companies that fail to meet these new obligations could face penalties and steep fines. Violations of GDPR alone cost companies over $2 billion in 2023.
A study from the Capgemini Research Institute found that when executives were asked to rate the top challenges organizations face while preparing for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), legacy IT (42%) emerged as critical.
When you consider the cost and the risk involved in keeping them, retiring your legacy applications—your problem children—starts to look like a sensible approach. You can’t turn everything off at once, so you need to start somewhere.
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Considerations for application retirement
Assess the current value and usage
Gather data including application usage metrics, user feedback, performance issues, and maintenance costs. This is the time to learn about all the workarounds and hacks your team uses to avoid the deepest issues with the application, impacting productivity and increasing the risk from human error. The news may be worse than you thought.
Analyze the application's value to the organization, including its contribution to business processes and strategic goals. There is a reason this application has stood the test of time, despite all the inefficiencies and frustrations — not to mention the risk — it entailed. Now consider: a more modern tech stack will enable better outcomes when it doesn’t depend on legacy software systems.
Compliance check. Understand whether the application meets current regulatory and security standards. The information you’ve gathered about usage and value is important, but this question is crucial. For example, the GDPR requires organizations to indicate at the time of data collection how long personal data will be archived, with the exact period specified by other regulations, such as Germany's GoBD. During this period, data subject to such rules must be archived in an unchangeable form and can only be deleted once the period has expired.
Weigh the costs against the benefits
Retiring an application, even a troublesome one, is a major project. You need to ensure it is worthwhile. This is a three-stage process:
Cost evaluation
This includes ongoing quantitative costs including maintenance, support, licensing, and infrastructure. Make sure you cast a wide net here – are there hidden costs incurred as a result of this application? For example, how does the application impact productivity, efficiency, and—in extreme cases, worker retention?
Benefit assessment
Identify the benefits provided by retiring the application, such as productivity gains or competitive advantages. Retiring an application is not a trivial move, so what is the upside?
Compare the two
Compare the total cost of ownership with the potential benefits of retiring the application and investing in alternative solutions. To help you visualize the process, check out our calculator, which helps you estimate the cost of decommissioning legacy applications.
Evaluate the risk and impact of retirement
We now move to the murkier world of risk, and its interaction with your legacy application.
Risk identification
As we’ve discussed, legacy applications bring an elevated level of risk to any organization. When planning to retire an application, you need to understand how this risk manifests itself in your organization. An independent data risk assessment or other assessment prior to ARP may be helpful in identifying risk across your legacy systems.
Identify any risks associated with application retirement, such as data loss, disruption to business processes, loss of service continuity, or user dissatisfaction.
Impact analysis
Based on this research, evaluate how retiring the application will affect different stakeholders, including end-users, departments, and integrated systems.
Mitigation plan
Despite their significant drawbacks, legacy apps are often the linchpin of a company’s systems, with other systems configured to integrate with the legacy application. It’s important to determine the dependencies and integrations of legacy applications as you make your plan.
Map out how the legacy application integrates with an ARP solution/platform, as well as other systems that may lead to disrupting critical workflows. Develop a strategy to mitigate the identified risks and manage the transition smoothly.
Decide and plan for implementation
Decision time. Based on all the assessments you’ve made, decide whether to retire, replace, or continue using the application.
Retirement strategy
Develop a detailed plan for the retirement process. This should include plans for stakeholder communication, data archival, and decommissioning procedures.
Monitoring and review
Implement the retirement plan and monitor its effectiveness. It is not enough to retire the application and assume things have improved. You need to quantify the impact to ensure it was worthwhile. Conduct a post-implementation review to evaluate the retirement itself and the impact it’s had. The goal is to ensure all aspects of the retirement have been addressed. This will vary depending on the retirement project, but common measures will include the application’s impact on cost and risk. So:
- If a given application is retired due mainly to its impact on costs, ensure this is measured post-retirement.
- If another application has an undue impact on risk or security, ensure these vulnerabilities have been addressed by the retirement.
- These periodic reviews should happen at least on a monthly cadence, for a year following the retirement, to account for any seasonality or usage patterns.
Your path forward: The legacy application retirement roadmap
ARP is not only a technical endeavor, but also a strategic decision aligned with broader IT governance and digital transformation goals. It enables organizations to utilize modern systems in their IT infrastructure, improve agility, and better support evolving business needs.
Understand the data and applications
Now that you have selected a given application for retirement, you can move to the retirement planning and implementation, beginning with an assessment of the data and applications.
Establish the business context
Understand the business context and set goals for the sunsetting project, as application retirement results in the shutdown of the application.
Identify dependencies
Dependencies come in two flavors: people who rely on the application to complete their tasks, and other platforms or infrastructure that require the application to function.
- Users: Evaluate any power and casual users of the applications, so business continuity can be maintained once the system is decommissioned.
- Data and infrastructure: Map out any data dependencies and integrations with other systems.
Remove dependencies
Time for your organization to move on from the old application.
- Identify and eliminate any data and infrastructure dependencies, including custom integrations with other aspects of your tech stack.
Consult legal/procurement teams to wind down ongoing contracts
This step cannot be skipped: make sure you can legally step away from the application and understand how this process must work.
- Work with legal and procurement to review license, privacy and maintenance agreements for any applications being retired
Prepare the data and applications
Often, organizations falter at this stage of application retirement, as they are fearful that they may lose unique data in the process. Along with fears about the possible impact to compliance, this is often the justification for keeping an application well past its usefulness.
- Data cleanup: Remove or archive redundant, obsolete, or trivial data (ROT)
- Data quality: Ensure the data is clean and accurate before you begin the archival process
- Data archival: Develop a strategy for archiving data to a new system or repository use data archival tools to facilitate the transfer and ensure data integrity
Archive and decommission the application
- Archival process execution: Archive data according to the established strategy
- Validation: Verify the integrity and accuracy of the migrated data in the new system
- Documentation: Archive documentation, including configuration files, user guides, and build information
- Sensitive information: Secure any sensitive data and ensure it is stored safely and in line with relevant regulations
- Final shutdown: Turn off the application and disable user access. Pop the champagne!
Hurdles ahead: Common challenges in legacy application decommissioning
Long-term data retention challenges
Turning off a legacy application is often seen as a quick fix to all an organization’s problems. However, data in legacy applications may still have value, and there are other reasons you may be required to retain data held within.
You may be subject to regulations that require some data to be retained for a certain amount of time, for example:
As well as being subject to general data regulations, your organization may find itself in litigation, in which case you will need to retain information to facilitate and cooperate with e-discovery procedures.
For these reasons, visibility into your legacy applications is important.
You need to understand what you have and where it lives, so you can maintain compliance and understand ROT and sensitive data. For data retention policies, data lifecycle management is key.
Data management challenges
For the above reasons, an organization may wish to retain the information held in a legacy system while retiring the actual system itself. However, transferring data from legacy systems to modern applications while ensuring data integrity can be challenging.
Without proper planning and data management strategies, organizations risk losing valuable information vital to their operations. Developing a comprehensive data management plan that supports data assessment, mapping, and governance can help.
Data archival challenges
Data archival is a complex process that requires time and effort, and must be prioritized against other IT projects. When things go wrong, unexpected downtime in a global corporation can result in significant business risk.
As the volume of data that must be migrated increases, so does the risk associated with archival in terms of downtime and data corruption.
Organizations which remove data in line with data minimization requirements will do better here, as will those which have removed redundant, obsolete and trivial data (ROT).
Tools that automate the extraction of data from legacy systems will reduce manual effort and error.
Smooth transitions: Sunsetting and migrating with RecordPoint
Reduce costs with data visibility and optimization
The RecordPoint platform offers a unified view of all stored data within legacy applications, simplifying data management and minimization. Simply connect the legacy systems and content sources slated for retirement through our Enterprise Connector framework.
Our solution lets you seamlessly mass extract data from legacy systems, reducing the need for manual intervention and streamlining archival and retirement—all without risking loss of critical data.
Our API-led approach allows customization of the platform to fit your specific processes, reducing dependency on extensive human capital during the modernization process.
Modernize your IT infrastructure and quickly adapt to evolving technological landscapes, ensuring a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) over time.
Ensure compliance and secure data management
Once you've migrated your legacy data, you may need enhanced data governance. Whether you're decommissioning data or retaining specific information, RecordPoint offers comprehensive data lifecycle management. Our platform provides end-to-end governance across your entire information estate, ensuring that all data — legacy or current — is managed efficiently and according to your organization’s needs.
The RecordPoint platform provides comprehensive audit logs for every event and interaction, ensuring meticulous documentation to meet stringent compliance requirements.
Easily access enterprise-level reporting for detailed insights into records and user activity, facilitating seamless sharing with regulatory bodies as needed. By prioritizing security through a legacy application modernization strategy, organizations can maintain trust, protect their brand reputation, and operate with confidence in an increasingly complex digital landscape.
Enable innovative IT transformation and AI readiness
Simplify and modernize IT operations to optimize resource utilization and empower IT teams with enhanced efficiency and focus. After data transfer to your target system, IT teams can efficiently redirect resources toward valuable and current projects while maintaining robust search and retrieval capabilities for important data.
This streamlined approach not only reduces the complexity of IT environments but also enhances productivity by focusing efforts on strategic initiatives rather than maintenance of outdated systems.
In addition, standardizing data ensures it's clean and ethical for use in AI models, enabling explainable AI (XAI) outcomes. With improved agility and responsiveness, organizations can navigate technological advancements more effectively, ensuring they remain competitive. Effective legacy modernization approaches foster innovation and contribute to a more efficient and cost-effective IT ecosystem.
The upside: Benefits of phasing out legacy applications
We’ve discussed ARP almost exclusively in the context of “avoiding negative outcomes”, but there are considerable upsides to saying goodbye to a legacy system too.
Cost reduction
Reduced total cost of ownership
Legacy applications contribute significantly to technical debt, which researchers estimate will become a larger cost for companies over time.
Reduced maintenance costs
Legacy technologies cost more to operate — and keep operational. It can cost over $30M to operate and maintain one legacy system. And by conservative calculations, at least $1.14 trillion is spent on maintenance of existing IT investments including legacy systems.
Increased annual revenue
Application modernization strategies offer more than cost savings. According to research, it delivers annual infrastructure savings of 15% to 35%, slashes app maintenance costs by 30% to 50%, and reduces overall expenses on hardware, software, and staff by 74%. The outcome? A clear 14% boost in annual revenue.
Compliance and secure data management
Decreased security risks
Legacy vulnerabilities may be the biggest enterprise cyber risk. Outdated security and lack of updates make legacy apps prime targets for cyber threats, as attackers actively exploit unpatched, EOL, and legacy systems. Many bad actors unsurprisingly target vulnerable, overlooked legacy systems to gain initial access to target systems.
In its 2019 study of several critical federal government systems, the US Government Accountability Office noted that several of the legacy systems operated with known security vulnerabilities and unsupported hardware and software.
Improved protection of sensitive data
Legacy systems often lack current oversight, leaving you unaware of stored ROT, duplicates, and sensitive data at risk. This can lead to significant dangers like breaches, data loss, or regulatory issues. Proactive data minimization and defensible disposal is a key way to reduce low value, at risk data in case of a breach or cyberattack.
Reduce potential of costly fines and noncompliance
As legacy systems often lack compliance with stringent data privacy laws like CPRA and the GDPR, embarking on an application retirement journey will make it easier to improve your compliance. Application retirement reduces the risk of significant penalties under these laws.
Streamlined IT transformation
Break free from innovation constraints
Modernizing legacy applications can liberate organizations from the constraints of maintenance and technical debt, freeing up time and money for more strategic initiatives.
90% of IT decision makers say legacy systems are holding their organizations back from using digital technologies to innovate or make operational efficiencies.
Increased investment in customer experience (CX)
Organizations are severely impaired in their ability to effectively respond to evolving customer demands instead of spending time and resources attempting to keep legacy systems alive. They miss the opportunity to take advantage of modern technology, which might allow them to operate a similar system that is more manageable and upgradeable, and that might allow IT teams to add modern features to improve efficiency, lower risk, reduce costs, and be responsive to a rapidly changing market.
Safely prepare for the era of AI
Generative AI is revolutionizing IT, changing roles, processes, and strategies. And investment is soaring — 95% of senior leaders are now investing in AI. However, many leaders are ignoring the foundational functions AI needs to thrive, such as secure applications and data provenance for explainable AI (XAI).
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report for 2024, only 24% of GenAI initiatives are being secured, threatening to expose the data and models to breaches.
As well as securing the deployment of the models themselves, and governing their usage, successful adoption of AI depends on securing the training data.
Organizations deploying AI tools like Microsoft Copilot must ensure the model only has access to high-quality data that has been classified to enable sensitive customer data to be masked or removed. Retiring legacy systems is an obvious priority for those wishing to embrace AI.
Time to retire
To review, the growth and evolution of organizations is a key driver in enterprise system acquisition. As newer systems become part of the IT landscape, older systems become less valuable to the organization and provide a lower return on investment. Costs balloon, technical debt accumulates, and security and compliance risk swells to an unacceptable level.
What’s an organization to do?
Application retirement planning is the key to getting out from under these challenges and embracing modern applications and solutions, as well as related technologies such as AI.
However, organizations may avoid ARP out of fear of losing access to important data or the impact retirement may have on their compliance posture.
RecordPoint brings confidence to the ARP process, optimizing cost efficiency and data visibility, ensuring secure compliance, and driving IT transformation.
Wave goodbye to your legacy applications, without fear. Learn more by booking a demo.
Trusted by highly regulated organizations around the world
RecordPoint helps you retire legacy applications with confidence. Our solution optimizes cost efficiency and data visibility, ensuring secure compliance and driving IT transformation. Gain comprehensive visibility, securely consolidate data, and modernize operations with RecordPoint for enhanced efficiency and AI readiness.
With API-led connectivity and unified data visibility across legacy applications, seamlessly connect to any legacy system for data archival and retirement. RecordPoint facilitates compliant retirement of legacy applications from high-cost environments while retaining access to essential data for business or compliance needs. Strengthen your data security posture by addressing legacy vulnerabilities and modernize IT operations, positioning your organization for innovation.