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Cloud computing, machine learning, big data analysis and automation - these innovations have quickly become part of daily business workflow. If your legacy infrastructures don't allow access to these new technologies, modern applications running alongside legacy ones might unlock their full potential if properly connected; in an average business, 1,295 cloud services are used, and for maximum effectiveness, they must integrate smoothly with legacy systems or ERP software. This guide details both the challenges and advantages associated with legacy system integration as well as ways to approach its execution.
What Is Legacy System Integration?
Integration of legacy systems requires linking old software with modern applications in such a way as to benefit both. If done successfully, integrated apps will complement each other in such a manner that brings numerous advantages for your business and bring many rewards - as an example:
Integrating legacy applications with modern systems can significantly streamline business complex processes by optimizing core functions. Integration shouldn't be treated like magic; rather, its prescription should depend on each case individually - find out which cases these are today!
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What Is The Relevance Of Legacy System Integration?
What are the major obstacles to legacy system integration? Being bound by your old system with all its limitations is usually the biggest stumbling block to integration success, sometimes so severe that only an overhaul will suffice to fix them.
Before beginning an integration journey, an exhaustive audit must be performed of your current setup to assess any gaps that need filling or vulnerabilities that should be considered before undertaking integration work. In particular, we recommend that you consider integration:
- Your company could be sitting on an overwhelming amount of legacy data that's crucial to its operations, yet migrating this system might cost more than simply managing old software's deficiencies. Integrating into more modern systems will allow you to maximize its value while protecting its privacy.
- Your system must fulfill various essential functions to keep your business afloat, adding value while carrying out tasks according to plan.
- You are merging two businesses but, due to one or more reasons listed above, cannot migrate seamlessly to more modern solutions.
- Your current system works smoothly or has abundant data. However, you would like to implement additional features or functionality into it.
- Have a system or dataset that works flawlessly and contains valuable data? A better interface would certainly come in handy. And yet you need to share that data legally to abide by regulations?
The Benefits Of Legacy System Integration
Here are some of the most common reasons that companies choose to integrate their new systems with legacy applications:
Operating Efficiency
Integrating legacy applications is often done to increase operational efficiency. Integration is necessary for employees to enter data manually - wasting their valuable time while slowing other processes down or leading to errors in the data processing.
Existing Data Can Be Used
Integrating legacy BI systems gives you a chance to use existing intelligence, reports and customer data more efficiently than simply discarding them altogether.
Modern Functionality Is Available To All
Most companies that integrate new services with existing systems do so to take advantage of the features the service offers, often seeking functionality not available from previous systems. Other organizations connect new services with legacy ones because they desire these features that come along with them.
Better User Experiences
Integration between SaaS and legacy systems may be required to deliver an updated user experience. A local retail store selling hundreds of items might need to connect its legacy inventory system to an ecommerce platform to expand online.
Implementing New Technologies Faster
Integrating your application allows you to implement new technologies more rapidly than attempting to modernize the entire system. Building an API may make the integration even faster. Integrating new technologies and features seamlessly into an existing system is the easiest way to keep up with cutting-edge developments and functionality.
Modernization Without Going Overboard
Integrating third-party tools into an existing system enables you to avoid having to completely modernize it, providing new features, improved efficiency and enhanced user experiences without needing to rebuild the core business system from the ground up.
Reduced Manual Labor
The risk of error increases when you have to enter the data again and again. You only need to enter data once when all of your systems are in sync. You can be much faster and more accurate.
Better Decision-Making
Integrating legacy systems and modern solutions will enable you to access the valuable information collected over time, detect patterns in it and use it more strategically for strategic decision-making. For example, historical CRM data could reveal more effective means of keeping existing customers and drawing in new ones.
The Learning Curve Is Minimal For Older Employees
Replacing legacy software with new systems is often challenging, particularly if they were utilized for core business processes. Connecting an older app with modern systems usually relies on using tools familiar to employees who use both systems simultaneously.
The Learning Curve Is Minimal For New Staff
Many legacy systems need more intuitive usability compared to their modern equivalents. They may prove challenging for new employees to understand. By integrating your systems, your modern business will become less dependent on these software solutions - thereby shortening learning curves and helping your new hires transition more easily into employment.
The Challenges Of Integrating Legacy Systems
Initial integration is simple when compared to the cost associated with legacy modernization or building an entirely new infrastructure from scratch. Examining legacy integration carefully reveals its complexity; according to research, one of the greatest hurdles to digital transformation lies in needing help to incorporate new technologies with existing IT systems.
An integration project offers many benefits; however, its challenges should also not be underestimated. If this situation arises again in future endeavors, reconstructing with modern frameworks might be the optimal option.
Insufficient Skills
Your organization might need more technical capabilities in-house to connect its system to legacy ones; additional services and products might take longer to implement than modernizing an older legacy system.
Documentation Is Lacking
Many legacy applications need more comprehensive documentation. When developers retire, and their legacy application remains to be discovered to current team members, its logic and patches become further obscured, making integration even harder than it needs to be. Do you have detailed documentation available for team members, with all knowledge being transferred? Your integration project could be put at risk without proper documentation.
Outdated Architecture
Many development teams incorrectly believe monolithic architectures will always fail; this is not true; micro-services may work better for some applications due to reducing unnecessary complexity.
Developers that find updating and maintaining difficult, leading to time-consuming reviews or unwieldy coding, could result in outdated data or system architectures. Your outdated architecture may make integration projects more complex.
Cybersecurity Is A Concern
Connecting too many systems can expose security holes. Without enough cybersecurity resources to test and detect possible flaws in them all, too many may remain undetected for too long.
Cyber threats pose a considerable danger to legacy apps, with one survey finding that 74% of healthcare organizations experienced at least one cyber-attack; 70% still utilized legacy software systems. Integrating will further expose legacy systems, necessitating an effective plan for protecting them during and post-integration processes.
The Project Speed
These factors all add up to slow project progression; you might benefit from updating an outdated system if it takes so long for integration to take place.
Change Is Not Always Welcomed
Your employees might be resistant to change when faced with your legacy system's complexity; after working on it for so long, they know its intricacies intimately. Therefore, to successfully integrate, explain its benefits while making the transition easier as much as possible.
Data Of Low Quality
Legacy data formats and structures need to reflect current best practices, which means first organizing your data before trying to integrate it.
Lack Of Knowledge
People skilled in outdated technologies will be necessary for successfully integrating legacy systems. Without them on staff, integration could prove challenging; many colleges stopped teaching COBOL programming languages back in the 80s; as one of the oldest legacy programming languages, COBOL specialists have long since retired and can be difficult to locate today.
Legacy System Types
When it comes to integration with legacy applications and systems, there are three main methods:
Service Layers
Before your legacy data can be delivered to a new application, it must first be transformed using one or both strategies mentioned below. Alternatively, information coming directly from older systems might need to be transformed to be accepted by their counterpart in some format for delivery to your new app. It has proven to be one of the best strategies for integrating older systems.
Layers Of Data Access
The data access layer (DAL) isn't just another service; it's just another database. With DAL, it is possible to recreate data from an older system using its architecture but with added flexibility, making integration and use much simpler for you.
APIs
Program interfaces can make future integration with other services simpler, making legacy system access accessible and providing flexibility. You should build custom APIs if you plan to implement your legacy system into multiple services over the coming years.
Read More: Options To Modernize Legacy Systems
Five Steps To Integrating Legacy Systems
Follow these steps to ensure a successful Legacy Integration project:
Clarify Your Integration's Purpose And Needs
Before setting goals of integration and seeking internal approval, discuss its objectives. Will data need to move both ways between databases? Which database calls are most essential? And finally, which data needs to be transformed and into which format?
Integrate The Existing System By Assessing Its Capabilities
Review your existing system carefully, taking note of its code, data architecture and UX. Consider what options may exist; your custom API could be built within two to four weeks, or it may involve extensive integration work for new services being deployed within your company.
Find Out About Potential Solutions And Resources
Research to see if there's already an ideal solution available.You might discover that using an integration platform-as-a-service (IPaaS) instead of building custom integrations for each SaaS provider separately would be more cost-effective.
Enterprise integration strategies must be agile, adaptable and reasonably priced if they're to succeed in today's environment. CIOs we encounter are beginning to recognize the necessity of an integration platform-as-a-service (IPaaS), connecting all services into a unified whole for seamless cloud journeying without cumbersome point-to-point integration hassles impeding the way. IPaaS also makes adding SaaS apps simpler without lengthy point-to-point processes hindering their implementation journeys.
Select The Integration Type And Get It Done
Once your findings are clear, decide on an integration solution - be that building your API, connecting an IPaaS account with Custom API support, creating a Data Access Layer or some combination thereof. Make sure that a Product Manager is hired to coordinate all moving parts successfully.
Plan For Maintenance And Test The Integration
Start the integration, then test it! Functional tests, performance tests, penetration tests and scanning for vulnerabilities should all form part of this testing phase. Plan how you will conduct quality and security assessments in the future. Your roadmap must reflect any new integrations or updates that take place, which requires periodic checks.
Main Approaches To Integrating Legacy Software With Modern Technologies
No "recipe" is perfect for connecting old systems to modern software. We've selected the top legacy integration techniques, from the most difficult to the most simple, to help you understand your options.
Integration Point-To-Point
P2P Integration is a method of connecting two applications using custom code. This method is an easy way to integrate your old systems with new ones. However, this is only worth it when you:
- You're working with only one integration method, and your team needs more expertise.
- The integration should perform a basic action (for instance, updating customer information in the CRM system whenever there are changes to your ERP).
- Two home-grown products are being used, and not any third-party systems.
- You have these systems running in your home.
Suppose your goal is to align multiple applications or systems together. Finding alternative means may be more suitable than trying to use legacy approaches alone. Why? Companies today depend heavily on third-party applications that are constantly developing to keep running smoothly, meaning integrations will need to be created and then modified every time a third-party app that connects to legacy systems releases an update. Building just one integration can take months; keeping pace will likely become impossible as you scale.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
The foundation of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an enterprise service bus (ESB). SOA emerged during the 1990s to replace monolithic software architecture, composed of software components which carry out discrete functions; SOA consists of numerous service buses for communication within an SOA framework and allows all its parts to exchange information among themselves and interact.
An ESB, or Enterprise Service Bus, acts as middleware that connects different SOA components so they may exchange data more freely within it. As such, Enterprise Service Buss (ESBs) have become the go-to solution for integrating various kinds of software within an organization. Some advantages of using an ESB to integrate legacy systems include the following:
- This allows multiple applications to be integrated into one ecosystem.
- Standardizes communications between all applications in the organization.
ESBs were replaced with more decentralized methods of integration by the introduction of the microservices architecture. The following are the cons of using ESBs for legacy integration:
- This is because it is a central component which is susceptible to being a single point of failure. All systems will be affected if there is a crash or slowdown.
- Most ESBs were designed as on-premises solutions for internal systems. It is impossible to integrate legacy apps with cloud-based third-party systems.
An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) may provide the solution you've been seeking if you want to integrate multiple legacy systems. An ESB serves as a central software component, connecting various applications in an ecosystem with each other, acting like an intermediary translator between systems via message queues, message converters and "plugged-in" applications.
How exactly does an ESB function? Consider an instance where hospital administration comprises various apps requiring data in different formats (XML, CSV, JSON, TXT etc.), with each expecting data in different forms such as CSV, XML, JSON or TXT, with an ESB in place, the information flow will look something like this:
A doctor enters their prescription into their app. Apps need to exchange information easily between themselves in an understandable format, such as lab test results, prescriptions, diet restrictions or costs between themselves and any other apps used like lab results.
Sends information in bulk instead of sharing directly, making the physician-created app no longer responsible. A message queue will register any applications requesting prescription information. A queue of messages checks if each app is "eligible" to receive information before passing all relevant details to converters.
Information collected for each prescription is then converted to its expected format and sent directly to an app receiving it. Should an app become temporarily inoperable, an ESB message request will be saved. It will be sent as soon as the service comes back up again.
However, although an ESB might initially seem more efficient than a P2P solution, there are certain drawbacks. An ESB does not impose limits on how many messages it can transmit at one time and does not support load balancing, so frequent crashes in busy environments are commonplace.
ESBs tend to be on-premise and unsuited to microservice architectures; their main function is an internal application rather than an external one, and they store large volumes of data - qualities which have made ESBs an outdated method for integration that no longer fits modern applications.
Read More: Are Legacy Systems Holding Back Your Business Growth?
API (Application Programming Interface)
Rules that dictate how an application should "act" to gain access to data or features of another app. They act like messengers between systems, accepting messages and responding in ways both understand. App A (hotel management system) may need information from App B (weather app) to calculate an optimal room price tomorrow - contact App B's API, then return the requested data through protocol!
When software needs to use features of another, this same process applies. For instance, App A may use App C's API for predictive analytics to find suitable hotel rates given various variables (including weather).
APIs have quickly become an industry staple as an easy and flexible means to link diverse technologies, including legacy ones, together. A global survey discovered that nearly 80% of developers feel participating in API economies is or will soon become a top priority within their organization.
APIs define and establish rules and protocols that define how software interacts. Similar to an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), APIs serve to enable collaboration among various pieces of software. APIs offer the following benefits in comparison to an ESB:
- Most modern applications are compatible. You can use your old system with both internal and external tools.
- Cloud applications can be integrated. It is important to note that the average company uses over 1200 cloud-based applications.
- Businesses can use these tools to share data with their customers and third parties, as well as monetize it.
Most legacy applications do not support API connectivity. It is important that companies:
- Hiring developers who are knowledgeable about APIs and the technologies that legacy systems use is a good idea.
- Create custom APIs to integrate legacy systems.
- Upgrade their existing systems to API-based support.
The challenge of legacy integration using APIs can take time and effort. As is evident here, Apps A, B and C don't share all their functionalities or data - only what's necessary. You could argue that APIs and ESBs share similar capabilities. Application programming interfaces are superior to ESBs in several aspects. You can, for example:
- APIs offer you a way to integrate many apps without overloading a system; an ESB will only support connecting small numbers of them.
- APIs aren't enterprise service busses (ESBs); rather, they're part of microservices architectures or cloud environments and compatible with both internal apps as well as third-party apps from outside providers.
- Modern applications typically support APIs directly, meaning no further integration techniques need to be attempted for modern products.
- APIs can be reused multiple times, meaning you don't have to develop new APIs whenever exposing data or functionality from one system to another system.
- Utilizing APIs will enable you to take full advantage of all the functionalities offered by API Gateway, including monitoring and analytics to track their performance, such as monitoring request counts to limit crashes. Furthermore, opening up API access to third parties provides you with an avenue for monetizing data or services provided through it.
APIs have quickly become the go-to way of connecting technologies. The services you wish to incorporate with your existing environment will support API connectivity; using any other integration method might prove challenging; in certain countries, banks must share data through APIs with providers of financial services to comply with laws mandating such sharing practices.
If your legacy system already includes an API, things should go smoothly; otherwise, it might prove more challenging, as legacy applications were often designed before APIs became popular. Creating APIs requires expertise and financial investment in designing robust APIs while working with various technologies used by legacy systems to help ensure success. Remember to refactor legacy apps to ensure API-friendliness as part of any process for adding or changing them.
Platforms For Integration Or iPaaS
Suppose you possess the expertise required to build APIs from scratch for your legacy system and wish to save time searching for suitable developers. In that case, an API might provide the answer. An iPad suite is a set of SaaS solutions intended to integrate applications that offer different levels of integration capabilities, using adaptors and connectors preconfigured with APIs or even ESBs for easy management of integration projects.
Companies using an iPaaS suite can build and manage various integration projects easily using its tools as connectors, adaptors or APIs that make up its integration platforms, such as data, business processes, systems applications or any software required in integration projects - which otherwise wouldn't exist or need be created from scratch in isolation or by other means. The following are the advantages of integration platforms:
- These tools allow companies to create integrations quickly and easily without having to spend months coding.
- Both on-premises, as well as cloud integration are possible.
- The vendor will maintain your integrations.
Using a third-party platform to integrate legacy systems can be problematic:
- You may need the connectors, APIs etc., that you need for integration. You need to integrate.
- If you choose the wrong vendor, it may lead to a situation where your vendor is locked in.
- There is a risk involved when using third-party software.
There's another side, though; an iPaaS service provider relies on you. They may not have all of the connectors and ESBs needed, or they might not support legacy system formats that make integration platforms invisible to them, making you miss out on experiencing their simplicity altogether. For a comprehensive overview, please take a look at our article about iPaaS here.
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Last Thoughts
Integration of legacy systems is no joke despite "spaghetti codes", poor documentation and no available developers who specialize in technology older than grandma's technology. If your budget prohibits modernizing it for whatever reason, integrating legacy software with modern ones may bring life back into an outdated system, but achieving optimal results using an effective strategy is imperative for its successful execution.
