2 posts tagged with "Legacy"

The single most common reason decommissioning programmes stall is not budget, and it is not governance. It is the moment someone says: "We cannot close that system yet because we do not know what depends on it."

This is a reasonable concern. In a large enterprise estate, systems have a way of accumulating connections: integrations built years ago, data flows set up by teams that no longer exist, dependencies that never made it into the CMDB. A system that looks straightforward to close on paper turns out to have a dozen connections nobody documented.

Most technology leaders know that legacy systems are expensive. What is less well understood is that a system you have already decided to decommission, but have not yet closed, is often the most expensive system in your estate.

It carries all the costs of an active system: licence fees, hosting, support overhead, the staff time spent keeping it stable. But it also carries the costs of its transitional state. The team responsible for it has mentally moved on. Patching cycles slip. Monitoring becomes inconsistent. The system sits in a state of managed neglect that concentrates both financial and operational risk.