It’s Time to Modernize Your Legacy Applications
Save time and money — and keep your enterprise systems resilient — with automated testing.
By: Team CodeHunter™
If you’re like many of the CTOs, CISOs, and business leaders we work with, you’re likely frustrated by clunky legacy applications that pose security risks for your company. We hear you: One of the main threats to businesses and government agencies alike are outdated operating systems. Legacy applications — which make up the majority of BOS in the U.S. — are chock full of loopholes and vulnerabilities (after all, they were designed 10-20 years ago, an eternity in tech time.)
Why It Matters
Strong cybersecurity platforms protect overall business interests, including critical sales components such as brand and reputation. Security breaches are not only costly, they also damage hard-earned influence. A single publicized attack — like the recent breach at Microsoft — can undermine reputation and sales overnight. For a smaller company, a security breach can leave you underwater.
To Upgrade Or Migrate?
With all the security challenges presented by legacy systems, it may seem like a no-brainer to simply upgrade and rebuild from the ground up — but legacy software can function as a mainframe application or operating system. Rebuilding requires downtime and pausing business as usual, which can be both highly inconvenient and potentially costly. Beyond the challenge of overhauling all things tech to an entirely new platform, modern systems are expensive.
Modernizing legacy applications preserves the integrity of the original code and critical data points — ultimately re-designing the architecture of the applications to improve functionality and align with modern computing principles. The re-architecting of legacy code resolves many technical limitations, but some challenges still exist. Data interfaces and dependencies, batch schedulers, custom programs, and cybersecurity integration must ensure dependable future functionality and security.
Summed up — the two big challenges are:
Cost of New Systems Most business leaders, CTOs, and CISOs are very eager to embrace new software and technology, but upgrading can tip the budget into the red zone. For some, this is the difference between operating and bankruptcy.
Risk of Maintaining Legacy Systems The problem with legacy applications is far more risky than a user-experience inconvenience — the maintenance costs can become a burden over time, and a single human error can lead to a malware attack more costly than the upkeep of the system.
Without a doubt, investing in a new system will offer more protection across the board — including customer records, critical infrastructure, and IP firewalls. Considering all of the risks of legacy systems, the cost-benefit analysis still tends to fall heavily on modernizing and migrating legacy applications.
A recent report on the “State of Cyber Resilience” (Accenture, 2020) identifies a data-driven, business-focused, tiered-risk approach to securing enterprise ecosystems. Following this guidance, business leaders often choose to modernize and migrate legacy application code rather than upgrade entirely — though the same report makes it clear modern systems are vastly outperforming legacy applications on every cybersecurity measurement. Regardless, data shows most businesses are still running legacy systems. A recent study by Tata Consultancy Services discovered that two-thirds of corporate business respondents run a compilation of legacy applications — and 70% of respondents are prioritizing mainframe and legacy modernization in their companies over the next three years.
The Solution: An Automated Testing Framework
Many of our cybersecurity experts have walked in your shoes at various points in their careers — eager to rebuild the whole system but stuck in the ongoing process of modernizing and migrating legacy applications. As a team, CodeHunter has identified two key areas where time and money are lost: manual testing and human error. We’ve spent countless hours (read: months and years) testing code manually — and witnessed how often human error misses important vulnerabilities.
The result? A completely new way of testing: Our automated solution outperforms manual testing on all fronts — including accuracy, human resources, and time — and functions with unprecedented accuracy. In addition, it supports collaboration across team members with a single, integrated platform, and reduces time spent hunting and resolving malware from weeks and months to minutes or hours.
CodeHunter is here to secure your systems while saving you time and money when you modernize and migrate your legacy applications. Sound too good to be true? Explore the possibilities now!
