In our hyperconnected world, customers and businesses need the ability to process business transactions in real time. Business transactions – such as an order received, a product shipped, an invoice paid, or a notification sent to a customer – are crucial pieces of data that need immediate transparency. Many of these actions take place in legacy applications and need to be propagated to other applications so additional actions can be taken across the business. Accomplishing this concurrently is essential to gain business agility, grow operational efficiency, improve customer experiences, and more.
Businesses need
integration solutions that help ensure all applications can rely on up-to-date information and react in real time to relevant business events as they happen. When businesses use integration solutions that can respond to relevant business events in real time, inventories are instantly updated in response to online or in-store purchases, and emails can be immediately sent to customers when their orders have a change in status.
Let’s examine a few of the issues businesses face in trying to leverage their data from legacy systems in real time.
- Integrating legacy systems with modern apps, systems, etc.: Most legacy systems do not come with native capabilities to interoperate with modern You need to be able to find data in the legacy system and pass it to the next application, which must then act on that information. Application program interfaces (APIs) are a primary solution to help legacy and modern systems communicate with the outside world. Event brokers and other middleware technology can then help dispatch the information to other applications that need it. Creating, managing, and utilizing the correct APIs and middleware technology is often very complex for those who don’t know where to start, leading to poor integrations with systems that communicate slowly or are vulnerable to security breaches.
- Data for relevant business events: Given that legacy systems would have been used within your organization for years, they often contain large volumes of It’s often hard to know what data your organization could use to improve business processes. Without the proper tools in place, your organization will suffer from being unable to leverage data from legacy systems.
- Connecting to multiple clouds securely and within compliance mandates: Many businesses make use of several different cloud service providers in addition to running various applications on Connecting multiple cloud-based systems to multiple other systems presents immense challenges in ensuring compliance across the entirety of your IT landscape.
Research found that 88% of systems are legacy, of which 45% are legacy mainframe. More than half (52%) are core to the business, and the rest are supporting applications.1
The impact of using data from legacy systems in real time
Businesses face several issues in trying to connect multiple applications to deliver seamless business processes. By investing in modern, cloud-based integration, though, organizations can apply integration to their most pressing needs and then scale their efforts across the enterprise for maximum business impact. Let’s dive into a few of the benefits associated with leveraging data from legacy systems in real time.
- Leveraging event processing to improve your business: Event processing enables your applications to communicate asynchronously in real time through events. With event processing your applications can exchange business events that allow immediate action. For example, when an item leaves a warehouse, an event is created by a legacy app, and then a text is sent to the recipient via a new, integrated cloud.
- Utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to unlock intelligent automation: Many legacy systems do not support the use of AI or ML Leveraging proper integrations with the cloud, your organization can use data from your legacy systems and take advantage of AI and ML technologies to automate key business processes and streamline organization functionality.
- Scaling operations with the power of the cloud: Legacy systems are used for batch processing and do not offer the same unlimited scalability as do systems that take advantage of the cloud. By utilizing the power of cloud-based systems for real-time transaction processing, your organization can take capitalize on the ability to propagate information across your entire IT.
A study reveals that 50% of the global legacy application landscape is expected to modernize in the next two years, with 70% to 90% modernizing in the next five years.2
Interested in learning more? Check out these resources:
1, 2 “
Infosys Modernization Radar 2022: Half of Enterprise Legacy Applications to be Modernized in the Nex... Years,” PR Newswire, May 5, 2022.
