Old systems can be smudged ghosts of a bygone era, you have an old machine. But progress costs money, and replacing them means toting around years of old technology. Transactions are still transferrable on the old mainframe.

But due to technological change so quickly, putting these older systems in new settings is now required by almost all companies. This article will explain how you can migrate legacy systems and what to look for along the way.

What Is Legacy System Integration?

Legacy system integration synchronises legacy systems to the current platforms and applications with full functionality retained. The consolidation allows companies to build on investments and deploy new technologies that provide innovation, productivity, and differentiation. Data Integration: Companies with the right data integration plans can replace their legacy and up-to-date infrastructure with new technology and still keep everything running and continue to upgrade their infrastructure.

Examples of Legacy Technology

The main types of legacy systems tend to be split into multiple key types, which each have their own important function in enterprise IT architecture:

Mainframes: IBM z/OS machines and other mainframe systems are still used in a lot of big companies (especially banking, insurance, and government). These are systems that can handle transaction volumes, processing billions of transactions a day with almost inconceivable reliability. Most enterprises run their business on mainframes as they offer the greatest stability, security and processing power for big batch operations.

Message Queues: Message Queuing Systems are the nervous system of enterprise applications that can help you establish secure communication between multiple systems and applications:

• IBM MQ (previously WebSphere MQ) IBM MQ is a legacy enterprise messaging platform used for decades with high-security and mission-critical messaging capabilities on a wide range of devices.
• TIBCO Enterprise Message Service (EMS): TIBCO Enterprise Message Service delivers enterprise-grade messaging with robust real-time data sharing and integration with legacy applications.
• ActiveMQ: An open-source replacement, popular in Java environments. It is trustworthy in messaging and it can handle multiple protocols.
• RabbitMQ has caught on lately. It provides a small and lightweight message broker which is very efficient for solving difficult routing issues.

Databases: Traditional enterprise databases still keep all the important business data:

• Oracle Database the ultimate relational database for business with enterprise-class high availability, security and sophisticated transaction processing.
• Microsoft SQL Server integrates well with Windows environments and other parts of the Microsoft ecosystem, which makes it a staple of many enterprise data infrastructures.
• MySQL — Originally a web application builder, MySQL has been transformed into an enterprise database system that underlies many old legacy applications, especially in the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.
• PostgreSQL: Enterprise class functions in an open-source package. It also supports complex queries and special data types and it’s usually the preferred choice for specialty applications.

Files and Data Storage: Businesses need storage for their data needs that are growing:

• Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) made storage for big data possible, offering a scalable, fault-tolerant storage solution for large amounts of data running on commodity hardware. There are a lot of organizations with massive amounts of data in HDFS clusters.
• Standard Network-Attached Storage (NAS): File level storage easily accessible across networks. They usually store vital files, shared folders and application information that is inherited from years of operation.
• Storage Area Networks (SAN) provide block-level storage which is the key storage in many legacy applications especially databases and high-throughput applications with low latency data access.

Each system is a huge cost in infrastructure and institutional knowledge. While the current technology can be improved in some areas, older technologies often deliver battle-tested reliability, security, and performance so high they can’t be replaced entirely. A good way to bring these systems into the modern platforms is key to any digital transformation project.

Benefits of Legacy System Integration

There are many advantages of integrating legacy systems such as improved data visibility and access. Because access increases decisions get taken faster.

Integrated also simplifies business workflow, operational efficiency and productivity. It also enables organizations to use cloud computing for scale and cost reductions.

Challenges of Integration Legacy Systems

Integration provides lots of advantages, but organisations have to overcome a lot of tricky problems. Incompatibility between data formats is often the first big problem because legacy applications often use an old data format or proprietary standard. Integration is most effective when you have data transformation layers and use modern formats such as JSON or Avro.

There can be bottlenecks when older systems aren’t able to accommodate the latest workloads. Businesses should be careful with caching techniques and integration patterns to keep their performances at par. Security is another issue to take care of, the older devices might not be equipped with the latest security tools. That means layering security layers, strong authentication and data encryption over time.

Lack of knowledge and documentation is often a big issue for integration as the system documentation was either not there or not at all. Systems should be invested in, and knowledge gathered documented for future maintenance and adaptation by organizations.

And there is the skill scarcity issue as well, as it’s becoming hard to hire developers who know old technologies. Successful organizations solve this by enlisting system integrators and investing in training packages.

When to Integrate Legacy Systems

Enterprises often integrate legacy applications with new apps in times of growth, digital transformation, mergers and acquisitions or infrastructure upgrades. When you can find these triggers, integration is driven towards business objectives.

Be realistic about complexity and risk before you move old data into the new cloud systems.

How to Implement Legacy Systems & Best Practices

1. Review: Look at your existing systems, what’s working and what’s not. This analysis guides solution decisions, defines dependencies and risks, and sets a path for your integration roadmap.
2. Scheduling: A plan allows your team to seamlessly coordinate, allocate resources and set milestones. This systemic methodology makes integration work clear to all parties, so the hard integration work can be cut down on.
3. Choose the Tools: Choose the tools based on scalability and integration needs. Assess different integration platform options for matching business and data integration needs.
4. Data Mapping & Migration: Understand how old datasets match up with the new data architectures to map data migration. Handle legacy ERP integrations and other source system integration problems for legacy integration. The right tool will handle compatibility and data quality for enterprise integration.
5. Development and Testing: Update legacy code with continuous testing in an organized environment. This is a practice that verifies features, helps integrate apps better, and avoids having to have legacy systems around. Create well-described documentation for any custom integration solution you create for the reference later and maintenance cost of running the solution in the future.
6. Deployment & Monitoring: Start by doing small deployments for easy issue detection and fix before scaling to the organization. Check how the system is performing and collect user comments to streamline processes and make the integration work.

Legacy System Integration (FAQs)

So how does the legacy platform be plugged into it?

Legacy platform integration bridges dated systems with newer apps and platforms without compromising their functionality. This method helps businesses keep their most important business processes and upgrade their infrastructure.

What are some legacy systems?

Mainframes (such as IBM z/OS), legacy message queues (IBM MQ, TIBCO EMS), legacy databases (Oracle, SQL Server) and legacy storage (HDFS, traditional NAS). These systems generally support enterprise workloads and are often full of decades or years’ worth of business logic and data.

What are the difficulties with a legacy system integration and how can it be solved?

Major Issues: Data format incompatibility, performance issues, security problems, and doc deficiency. Data transformation layers, new security protocols, improved integration patterns with caching and investment in robust system documentation and training are solutions.

When should you migrate legacy systems?

Integration is the right choice when your legacy system has business logic that could be unsafely recreated, when replacement would be too costly and cumbersome, or when you need to slowly modernize without disrupting the business. The ideal time to do so is when the old system is still good enough to work but has to connect to new apps to support new business needs.