Legacy Systems Putting Government Enterprises at Risk

Government agencies across North America are reliant on legacy software systems to execute operations, manage data, and provide services. With much of this infrastructure designed in a different era of technology, many systems are now significantly outdated posing substantial risks and challenges going forward. Organizational reluctance to update enterprise software can result in several issues, including increased cybersecurity risks, growing technical debt, escalating operational costs, and increased workforce constraints.

To successfully navigate a path out of the legacy software maze towards a more innovative and sustainable government enterprise, let’s take a closer look at the risks involved in delaying system replacement and the tactics needed to overcome these hurdles.

Cybersecurity Vulnerability

Legacy software systems present an inviting target for increasingly sophisticated cybercriminal syndicates, some of which are state sponsored. Built on outdated platforms lacking the security protocols needed to defend against ever escalating cyber-attacks, the growing threat landscape for legacy systems presents challenges for government agencies on the following fronts:

Compliance Challenges
Legacy systems are often ill-equipped to comply with evolving regulatory requirements with the expedient and agile response required. Inability to meet legislative protection and privacy standards can lead to adverse legal, reputational, and financial consequences.
Security Protocols
Legacy systems are often unable to support and administer the latest security measures such as advanced encryption and multi-factor authentication, impeding the organization’s ability to protect sensitive and valuable data to the robust degree required.
Data Breaches
Lacking sufficient security protocols, legacy systems are prone to data breaches that put sensitive government and citizen datasets at risk. A successful cyberattack can shut down essential services, extort ransoms, and facilitate mass identity theft, creating potentially catastrophic outcomes for government agencies. In short, an unsecured legacy system carries the potential for a ‘worst nightmare’ scenario for government leaders and IT professionals.

“A successful cyberattack can shut down essential services, extort ransoms, and facilitate mass identity theft, creating potentially catastrophic outcomes for government agencies.”

Technical Debt

Technical debt is the rising cost to maintain inefficient and outdated legacy systems. Incurred when agencies postpone upgrades or overdue system replacements, technical debt leads to increased resource consumption and support constraints over time. Aging software systems, particularly those not well maintained by a capable vendor, can require frequent fixes and patches—many of which rely on outdated programming languages and technologies that more modern skillsets are ill equipped to support. Left unaddressed, rising technical debt can lead to the following consequences:

System Incompatibility
Legacy systems nearing obsolescence struggle to integrate with modern technologies, thus limiting an organization’s ability to deliver on overarching innovation agendas and related digital transformation initiatives.
System Instability
Due to their complexity and intrinsic support constraints, legacy systems can be prone to systems failures and downtime. Such disruptions to government services can lead to potential financial losses as well an overall decrease in citizen confidence and satisfaction.
Increased Ownership Costs
Technical debt costs escalate over time, diverting critical resources needed to foster innovation and service improvements. Maintaining outdates systems is often more expensive than upgrading to a modern software system, particularly if the current system is incapable of ongoing configuration to meet emerging and evolving business requirements.

Operational Costs

The ongoing operation and maintenance of legacy systems can be a substantial financial burden for government agencies, with costs extending beyond the obvious technical debt costs into various operational areas:

Reduced Efficiency
Archaic legacy systems slow down business processes thereby increasing operational inefficiencies. Employees expend costly time and effort navigating cumbersome interfaces and/or performing manual tasks that are easily automated with more modern software systems.
Resource Allocation
Government agencies are often forced to allocate disproportionate human, fiscal and infrastructure resources to maintain and secure legacy software systems, leaving fewer resources for digital transformation and service provision.
Escalating Infrastructure Costs
Legacy systems often run on outdated hardware that is costly to maintain and difficult to optimize for modern performance standards. Sourcing replacement parts and maintaining system compatibility with modern devices are time consuming and cost prohibitive tasks.

Growing Skills Gap

Government IT professionals tasked with maintaining legacy software systems are increasingly aging out of the organization, taking with them the specialized knowledge required to secure and optimize such systems. The growing skills gap caused by such retirements is causing a number of issues:

Declining Morale
For the staff that remain, working with legacy systems can be highly frustrating, contributing to decreased job satisfaction and declining staff morale. Such frustrations often result in reduced productivity and/or higher turnover rates, a particularly worrisome trend considering the increased competition for qualified technology workers.
Recruitment/Retention Challenges
Recruiting and retaining young IT professionals proficient in outdated technologies is increasingly challenging, with modern tools and technologies proving a stronger lure for today’s top technology talent.
Knowledge Transfer Hurdles
Transferring knowledge from retiring employees can be difficult with a lack of documentation and the complexity of legacy systems impeding the effectiveness of these efforts.

Best Practices for Legacy System Replacement

To quickly and effectively mitigate the challenges and risks associated with prolonged reliance on outdated legacy systems, today’s government enterprises are increasingly embracing comprehensive digital transformation strategies—initiatives with a clear emphasis on replacing near obsolete software systems with modern software solutions purpose-built to deliver robust security protocols, workflow automation efficiencies, and enhanced citizen user experiences.

To implement an innovation strategy that achieves cost-effective and sustainable system modernization, forward-focused agencies are encouraged to concentrate their strategic planning efforts on four key areas:

1. Open Standards & Interoperability

By adopting open standards to ensure interoperability between systems, government agencies are creating the necessary framework to eliminate the operational silos and data accessibility constraints systemic to legacy systems. In short, the effort to truly modernize the entirety of the organization starts with raising the bar to define a new operational standard that is unachievable within the constraints of limited legacy systems.

Implementing open interoperability standards facilitates several key benefits:

Security Enhancement: Legacy software is often susceptible to security breaches due to outdated protocols or an inability to issue timely security patches. Open standards incorporate modern security and encryption protocols, reducing if not eliminating outright those existing vulnerabilities compromising system security.
Integration Flexibility: Organizations frequently need to integrate new applications or upgrade existing systems. Open standards ensure compatibility between different software components, allowing for smoother integration processes without the need for extensive custom development or workarounds.
Cost Efficiency: Maintaining the protracted usage of legacy systems is costly, particularly when factoring the expenses associated with custom support contracts or the opportunity costs of delayed upgrades. The adoption of open standards reduces these costs, enabling the use of off-the-shelf solutions while reducing dependency on proprietary technologies.
Scalability and Futureproofing: Open standards are designed to evolve in step with technology advancement. By adopting open standards, government enterprises future-proof their IT infrastructure, ensuring ongoing system compatibility with emerging technologies and adaptability to changing business requirements.
Interoperability and Collaboration: Interoperability is crucial for collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers. Open standards facilitate seamless data exchange and interoperability across different platforms, enabling enhanced collaboration and operational efficiency.
Compliance and Regulation: Adopting recognized open standards equips government agencies to demonstrate compliance more easily while ensuring they meet industry-specific regulations.

2. Cloud Adoption

Cloud adoption by government agencies represents a paradigm shift away from outdated legacy software systems struggling with scalability, security vulnerabilities, and high maintenance costs.

Firstly, migrating to the cloud equips government agencies to offload the burden of maintaining aging infrastructure. Instead of investments in costly upgrades and patches, government IT staff can leverage the secure and scalable capabilities of the cloud, ensuring that computing resources scale flexibly on demand, eliminating the performance constraints plaguing antiquated legacy systems.

Cybersecurity is another area where cloud adoption yields numerous benefits. Cloud service providers make substantial investments in robust security measures, including encryption, threat detection, and access protocols. Leveraging the threat information sharing and global economies-of-scale inherent to the cloud, cloud-based software systems are equipped to maintain stringent compliance standards that are nearly impossible for independent organizations to match. Further, centralization of data storage/management in the cloud yields the capabilities for government enterprises to enhance data security by reducing the risk of breaches common to aging infrastructure.

Replacing legacy systems with modern cloud-based software provides the capability to facilitate automatic updates eliminating manual responses to install timely security patches, ensuring systems are up-to-date and fortified against emerging cyberthreats on an ongoing basis. Additionally, government enterprises can customize internal security settings, configuring data access and sharing capabilities specific to the needs of individual offices and roles.

3. A Sustainable Support Model

To achieve a truly sustainable support model, it’s crucial that the government enterprise recognizes the distinction between a legacy software vendor and a dedicated technology partner. Software vendors still operating with archaic legacy support models present numerous constraints for their government clients. The vendor may fail to keep pace with new technology innovations, be acquired by a new parent company that terminates product support and enhancements, or worse, go out of business altogether rendering their software obsolete.

In contrast, a dedicated technology partner will consistently invest in system enhancements and support and will update the system quickly and effectively with minimal downtime and productivity losses. Moreover, a dedicated technology partner will not only protect your greatest asset—your data—but will fully optimize this asset for usage both within the system and within the larger organization through improved data-accessibility and workflow automation.

To ensure your agency is working with a true technology partner, be sure to assess the following attributes in your vendor vetting process.

Confirm the vendor’s client list and the ongoing customer satisfaction of same.
Ensure the utility of the vendor’s cloud offering to facilitate frequent and seamless product and security updates.
Verify the company’s ongoing R&D expenditure and product roadmap to ensure your new system incorporates the latest technologies and is capable of maintaining competitive advantage over time.
Validate the company’s history, tenure, and track record in the industry, to guarantee your chosen technology partner has a proven and sustainable operational and support model.

4. Workflow Automation

From an organizational efficiency point of view, one of the most prohibitive problems with outdated legacy software is the inability of such software to seamlessly streamline data and workflows between systems. Because human beings are so adaptable at finding ways to make compromised workflows meet their needs, it is often difficult to fully appreciate how inefficient and time-consuming legacy processes can be in comparison to modern automation-assisted software systems. From navigating multiple non-integrated systems to manual paper dependent processes to siloed data accessibility issues, agencies making do with legacy systems are forced to operate at productivity levels far below peak efficiency.

By comparison, modern software systems are equipped with leading edge workflow automation, seamless data accessibility, and optimized user experiences ‘baked in’ to an off-the-shelf product offering. Convoluted business processes that were previously effort intensive can be extensively streamlined or eliminated altogether in favor of engineered workflows designed to maximize information inputs towards optimized outputs via best practice engineered business processes—configured specific to the needs of your unique regulatory environment.

The net result is a software system that lessens operational overheads and technology ownership costs while maximizing employee efficiencies, morale, and emerging skills adoption.

“The effort to truly modernize the entirety of the organization starts with raising the bar to define a new operational standard that is unachievable within the constraints of limited legacy systems.”

Taking Action Today

When implementing a new software solution, one of the greatest challenges government agencies face is achieving true solution adoption across every level of the organization—with adoption meaning not just leveraging the suite for essential daily business processes, but fully exploiting the platform to serve as a springboard for innovation across the entire organization.

Our POSSE Platform approach achieves this from day one, mentoring your internal SMEs and technical staff into enthusiastic innovation champions—fully capable of teaching and leading your broader organization into sustainable software system modernization.

Curious to learn more and find out how to get your desired software solution to market quicker and more cost effectively? Contact a CX Product Specialist today.