The majority of enterprise applications in production present a business liability because they run on legacy on-premise platforms and pose a barrier to innovation. As Covid-19 has forced business leaders to focus on new operating models and pushed CIOs to focus on organizational resilience, migrating these legacy apps to modern platforms in the cloud has become imperative for organizations.

However, Gartner, Inc. noted that “the transformation journey is taking large enterprises especially at least twice as long and costing twice as much as they originally anticipated.” This is, in large part, due to a lack of cultural readiness in which IT is seen as a service provider to the business, and this paradigm yields the wrong drivers for modernization initiatives:

• Legacy system support is reaching end of life. Support for key existing systems or components is set to be discontinued by the providers, as these products are reaching end of life.

• Maintenance costs are too high. The legacy systems have accumulated too much technical debt, resulting in significantly enhanced maintenance costs.

• Delays in releasing new features. It is difficult and time-intensive to integrate new features and capabilities required by the business.

Any organization contemplating or implementing an Application or Process Transformation Project should check out this Forbes article by Pyze CEO Prabhjot Singh for best practices and typical pitfalls.