Cloud and Infrastructure the Legacy of Legacy—The Ultimate Drag
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Cloud and infrastructure The legacy of legacy—the ultimate drag on condensing into a cloud About the series services, managing this broad range requires a view Contents on how much can change by when, an appropriate Overview operating model, and a balanced perspective on In order to enable new business and preserve existing what should be developed and controlled, and what About the series value, global Information Technology (IT) executives needs to be monitored and governed. should address the growing dichotomy between the Background agility companies want, and the stability they need. To help equip the IT executive in forming those views This dichotomy is becoming exacerbated as legacy and making those judgements we present points of Some existential threats 2 data centers becomes farther and farther removed view on key trends and topics. from the cloud and from mobile end users. Meanwhile, Determining a new landing platform 3 delivering data to devices and taking advantage of platforms often means giving up some control over Innovating the way 3 Background operating systems, hardware, and data centers. It’s 9 a.m. on Monday. Do you know where your data is? There are aging back office behemoths with little Refresh, transform, or replace 4 source code, no original developers, and growing Introduction operational risks. They are not cloud ready, or even Don’t forget the plumbing 5 As IT executives look to provide value from their IT refresh ready. We consider the legacy of legacy—a portfolios, they are balancing a mix of emerging, material part of the corporate landscape. Not Testing 5 current, and legacy technologies. With the world of confronting it is likely an existential threat. Mission technology ever evolving at pace, the gulf between critical transaction processing engines and back office Conclusion 5 emerging and legacy continues to widen. The systems may be on mainframes, or on large stand- consumer market drives advances in end user devices alone midrange systems with proprietary operating and end user expectations. Many service vendors systems. The hardware, operating, and database invest in cloud, virtualization, and orchestration, while systems may be outdated and unsupported. The manufacturers attempt to deliver more compute application interfaces and data transfer will likely be horsepower at lower cost. Behind the tablets, clouds, built in a way that binds them closely to the technology. and chips, there still sits a data center and a room full of legacy infrastructure waiting for refresh. The code, if available and documented correctly, has programming interfaces that need to be used and This widening gap between end user devices, data are not straightforward to change. The knowledge mobility, cloud services, and back office legacy of the application and interfaces may be in a small systems challenges the IT executive to manage and set of people. Data processing is likely started maintain technology in a complex array of delivery through overnight batch processing, perhaps using capabilities. From mobile apps to mainframe MIPS, customized job, event, and interface handling. and from in-house servers to sourced vendor 1 More than one IT executive has looked at his ageing Staff skills Data damage legacy systems, thought about how to get them Access to skills and institutional memory and Legacy infrastructure and data centres were to x86 virtualized platforms and concluded—“too knowledge fade and reduce as time passes. often built without considering some modern difficult to think about, on to the next problem.” Education, training, and practice largely maintain threats. Electronics and magnetic media are currency with technology trends. So as technology susceptible to electromagnetic phenomena. In this article we discuss how not confronting this ages, so do the skills and resources available to Over time electromagnetic events from solar now can be an existential threat to the enterprise. support it. Skills and knowledge shortages limit the activity are a certainty. Less certain, but no less We also offer some practical approaches for taking ability to get enough of the best people, lowering the threatening, are other sources, natural or manmade, on the legacy of legacy. probability that systems are properly maintained and of electromagnetic pulses. From any source, that incidents and problems are effectively managed. these events threaten electronics, including all Some existential threats This drives up the risk of more serious and sustained IT Infrastructure and magnetic storage media. service disruptions. Sufficiently strong events destroy data. Mitigation techniques are available. Data centers without some The possibility of a digital dark age looms ahead. levels of protection leave open the possibility of Technology advances at pace, and the gap between NASA in shortage of people with sudden and dramatic losses. legacy and emergent technologies grows. Data over time FORTRAN skills becomes unreadable, and then indecipherable as storage NASA requires engineers to communicate and archive media change or become unstable, software with the two Voyager crafts launched in White House preparing for catastrophic and operating systems evolve, and skills become extinct. the 1970’s and are unable to find people solar flares Aging hardware and software ultimately become over- with a skill set that includes command over John P. Holdren, asst. to the president for challenged with the size and performance needs of Fortran and the ability to control a 64KB Science and Technology, and director, Office modern data and interfaces, can no longer be compiled, memory machine. 2 of Science and Technology Policy, admitted patched or supported, and/or eventually hit the set of that solar flares pose a “significant conditions from which they are unable to handle or challenge” to technology. Studies estimate recover, and they fail. For some that archived data and Opportunity costs that such an incident would cause a loss of information is for all intents and purposes lost, as there is Ageing systems can become management and $2.6 trillion in the US alone. 3 no ability to restore it, nor to run software that can use it. money distractions. As support and maintenance increase in complexity, and as costs potentially rise to keep things running safely and securely with the right The passage of time and the evolution of technology The digital dark age skills, focus is distracted from other opportunities. are threats to the ability of ageing information Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, When IT Executives and their teams are spending technology to do its job. And in today’s economy that stated that one might soon enter the “digital too much time and money on legacy, they likely job can be no less than the ability of a business to dark age” as old formats of data and documents are not spending enough on other opportunities function. It can be an expensive and difficult path to may not be readable due to unsupported to add value to the business. Lack of business ditch the legacy and maintain technology currency. backward compatibility of devices. 1 enhancements may also drive business lines and Lengthy outages, security failures, or irrecoverable employees to form their own shadow IT. system and data losses will likely cost even more. 2 Information security Determining a new landing But before we look at some aspects of what to look Information security can be an issue for legacy as platform for in refresh, transform, or replace scenarios, we much as for emerging technology. There is likely will consider first ways an organization can build very little that does not interface and exchange momentum behind a legacy program, and strategic Confronting the legacy of legacy will not be easy, data in some way with a more modern system approaches to mitigating legacy risk. nor quick. IT executives should be considering how or end user capability. Perhaps operating on its to confront the estate and what the target landing own, an ageing mainframe system appears more platform or platforms should look like. secure. But as long as there is some manner for it to Innovating the way communicate with and share data or access to other One first step is to develop a target portfolio mix of systems and users, it is a potential vulnerability. Collaborate with the business technologies and platforms. Some business models may Those people that do harm—intentionally or not— Innovating your way out of legacy is about leveraging be suited to high levels of standardization such that there can exploit the most straightforward path, which the entire firm to think creatively about business could be very few, or even one type of target platform is often ageing mid-range systems or desktop processes and needs. It can be tempting to start or service. Others may require a mix of technologies applications no longer capable of being patched or a traditional legacy refresh program by trying to and platforms each optimally suited to their business supported in ways to prevent vulnerabilities being recreate the current system. Stakeholders may be value and competitive advantage. It may be the case that exploited. Legacy technology may not be in front of beholden to the way they do things and the manner certain workloads are best suited to a highly customized mind on this issue, but can be the most vulnerable in which the system in question serves them. So the solution, are optimal on mainframe, or are not best underbelly of your estate. starting position can often be a design exercise that suited to virtualization. In any case determine across the tries to move the existing legacy functionality to an portfolio the best suited target platform(s) and the target upgraded platform, or to replace it with something ratios of how much you want and where you want it. On an average, 4 percent of all the software that does the same thing in a similar way.