Fortunately, by working with a partner such as CDW Amplified™ Services, you can devise an effective process for moving what may be heavy workloads into a cloud or hybrid environment. This prescriptive approach will help you decide what the right solution is for your applications, and also help you understand what should — and shouldn’t — move.
The Consequences of Outdated Applications
You might think to yourself that your applications are performing well enough. But the fact is, tools get old. Applications may have been developed with extremely outdated programming languages or approaches that fail to take advantage of the technology improvements that exist today. If you’re using COBOL, for example, you might be missing out on many of the advantages of using a more modern programming language such as Java or Python.
Not every application is consumer-facing. But the consequences of falling behind can have lasting repercussions for internal facing apps as well, including:
Poor user interface: Older applications may not meet the needs of a modern workforce and customer base, which can negatively impact your business reputation. In the case of consumer-facing apps, that interface may be the only way that customers interact with you. With internal apps, a poor interface could be a turnoff to attracting potential talent.
Latency issues: An older application may suffer from higher latency compared with one developed using more modern techniques. This can lead to frustration for the user, and in the case of web applications, might even negatively impact your internet presence on search engines such as Google or Microsoft Bing.
Security and data loss: A major challenge with any application as it grows out of date is that it’s harder to update over time. If you have failed to keep your applications up to date with a modernized security stack, attackers can take advantage of weaknesses in your code and infrastructure to attack your application and its data. But that’s not the only factor that could affect the integrity of your data. Whether the cause is a security-based failure involving ransomware or a failure caused by outdated hardware, the risk of data loss is significant and could likely be mitigated by a more modern approach.
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