"Legacy Systems" generally refers to the existing IT assets deployed in the IT infrastructure. In most cases, this represents a significant amount of both cost and competitive value for businesses to leverage, aside from the fact that investment for completely new or replacement solutions can be extremely expensive.
On their own, neither the old or new technologies may result in a complete, cost-effective, or flexible enough solution to deliver the qualities of service required to satisfy customer needs. Businesses also need to respond rapidly to market opportunities with reliable, scalable, extensible, and secure production applications. These are the situations in which Legacy Systems Integration provides efficient value by incrementally extending the functionality of existing assets while delivering the advantages of new applications and technologies.
At Guidelight, we focus tirelessly on strategic planning as a main cog in delivering best-in-class, best-suited products. This process includes:
There are five possibilities when trying to identify interactions your system may have with other systems. These possibilities include:
There are several ways to identify your system interactions including checking your systems documentation, checking with enterprise architects, administrators, and operations staff, and of course analyzing the code itself.
After identifying a potential interface for which your system has involvement, you need to identify the other systems and/or assets that are related to that involvement. One key thing to acknowledge here is that your system falls within the interaction involvement of each of the external legacy systems, so you must also look for the same sort of interactions you would expect to see from the other systems point of view. This step in the process isn’t normally a difficult task, but it can definitely be time consuming.
Beyond knowing which external systems are interacting with yours, you need to understand how they're actually interacting. Issues to look for during this analysis include:
This part of the process is not always as easy and straight forward as it likely appears. Generally, it's easiest to identify systems that feed data directly into your system, but other interactions are more subtle and can often be much more difficult to identify.
These interactions might include systems or users that occasionally extract data from your system, perhaps for a quarterly report. Other instances might be systems that send data infrequently or invoke functionality to or from your system. These interactions also include all instances of links to the system, even if they're simply generated by a web page URL.
Analyzing Legacy Data Sources is normally the most difficult part of analyzing your systems interaction. This is generally the case due to systems differences including:
Additional possible issues related to data source analysis:
Code analysis is also a significant challenge, as legacy assets may include:
Guidelight provides best-in-class Legacy Systems Integration through legacy asset analysis, systems interaction analysis, data source analysis, along with source code analysis and software modeling. Our process focusses on working collaboratively and cooperatively with the legacy system owners so the project has the best visibility possible, and at the same time, we Work incrementally and in an evolutionary manner to ensure final products best meet project requirements.