4 Benefits of Replacing an Outdated Application Management System

There are three things every IT professional can count on:

• Death
• Taxes
• Obsolescence

The wheel of technology never stops turning.  In fact, it’s still accelerating. According to this article on Forbes, one could expect a web-enabled service in 1998 to have a shelf life of 3-5 years.  By 2013, that had dropped to 14-18 months. In 2017—much to the chagrin of IT departments everywhere—Microsoft started shipping major updates to the core features of Windows 10 every six months.

Your application management system of yesteryear might have been the right call when you adopted it, but legacy software modernization is a crucial responsibility of IT.  Obsolete software is a drain on everything it touches. Here some of the main benefits of switching to newer application management software: 

1. Better Usability

Software developers continue to advance their understanding of how non-IT people experience, think about, and use computers. Every generation of software has shown improvements like:

• A more intuitive UI
• Better automation of routine tasks
• A lower learning curve
• More efficient operability

You’re doing users (and yourself) a favor if you upgrade to an application management system that prioritizes simplicity and runs on convenient, time-saving templates that can be reused every year.

2. More Relevant Integrations

Your application management system isn’t the only asset in your software suite.  And new software solutions are joining the mainstream every year. To keep up with the evolving portfolio of software in your IT department, you need the most relevant integrations for today’s platforms.

Replace your outdated application management system with modern software that features out-of-the-box integrations for the rest of your technology suite. Up-to-date APIs make life easier by providing you with convenient functions like:

• SSO
• Information Pre-Population
• Person Lookups and Data Queries
• Activity Pushbacks

Neglect legacy system migration for too long, and your interoperability will slowly erode.

3. Current Security

There are some ways to improve security without replacing a whole system. However, outdated application management systems put your data at risk of breaches, downtime, non-compliance with security standards, and incompatibility with current security features.  In short, old software is the enemy of system security.

Today’s online application management software is often distributed in a SaaS format, which has incredible security benefits. Updates come in automatically via the cloud, there’s no need to purchase (or manually install) on-premise upgrades, and obsolescence is no longer a data security risk.

4. You Can Upgrade to the Cloud

A cloud-based application management system has numerous other benefits, too, including:

• More stability and uptime
• Easy access anywhere, anytime, on any device
• Less cost to the business compared to on-premise software
• Less maintenance on your end

This is why cloud computing will be relied upon by 90% of global companies within three years, according to MIT. Sundi Balu, CIO of Telstra, says in the same MIT Technology Review Insights report that legacy applications take “mammoth effort to update and maintain.” In contrast, SaaS software provides needed capabilities “out of the box.”

With benefits like these, your application management process can stabilize around an always-up-to-date SaaS solution that ends the risks of obsolescence.  

In other words…once you’ve replaced your outdated application management system, your IT professionals might only have to count on two things after all: death and taxes.

David Lincoln

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