Legacy systems can be a liability, and managing the data within them can be a giant headache. They’re built on aging technology that costs too much to maintain and leaves your company open to security vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately, many users feel stuck with them because they’re still supporting your current workflows and storing data you can’t afford to lose. Modernizing your systems seems like the next obvious step, so how can you address the challenges of managing legacy data still stored within the system?

Challenges of Managing Legacy Data

By modernizing your systems, you can streamline your workflows and pave the way for smoother integrations, but you still need to be able to access your legacy data.

Luckily, the challenges of managing legacy data can be overcome. Once you figure out what challenges await you, you can be better prepared to audit, clean, organize, and access your data without your legacy system slowing you down.

Storage and Maintenance Costs

The more data you have, the more memory and storage you need, leading to increased costs. Legacy systems often require specialized hardware, outdated licenses, and team members who still understand the old systems. Think about how much it costs to store and maintain your legacy data, along with the time required. You might also need to factor in the cost of third-party help if you don’t have the capacity to maintain your data in-house.

Keep in mind, by managing and cleaning up your data (deleting data you don’t need anymore, combining duplicates, standardizing formats, etc.), you free up space and save on costs. If you take the time to clean up your data, you could significantly cut down your storage costs.

Data Fragmentation

When your teams use different tools, their data gets stored in multiple places. Your accounting information lives in your ERP, while your customer data lives in your CRM, and your project details are scattered across shared drives. You need to be able to locate and integrate all of this data into one easy and accessible platform.

Data fragmentation makes it nearly impossible for you to get a complete picture of your business. When sales data doesn’t connect to inventory data, or customer service can’t see purchase history, your teams make decisions based on incomplete information.

Audit your data, merge duplicates, update outdated information, and clean up everything so your teams know where to find the right data and can trust its quality.

Compliance Challenges

Under GDPR compliance requirements, customers have the right to decide what happens to their personal data, but legacy systems often lack the security measures and flexibility to enforce this. Other regulations like HIPAA and SOC 2 also have specific data management requirements you need to keep in mind.

Non-compliance opens your organization up to fines, legal repercussions, and may even harm your reputation, breaking customer trust. That’s why you need a legacy data management system that guarantees data integrity.

Data Security Challenges

If you outsource how you manage your legacy data, how do you know if your data is secure? You need to know who takes ownership of your data, old and new. Everything needs to be locked down.

When you manage your own legacy data, you can set up backup protocols and encryption while enforcing data security policies. If a data breach occurs, you need to know which data is potentially affected. However you choose to manage your legacy data, make sure you know what security measures are in place.

Scalability Challenges

As you grow, where does your data live? You can’t let your data grow out of control into an unmanageable mess. Legacy systems were created with a different architecture, making it difficult to handle increased data and adapt to business changes.

The more customers you gain, the more data you must deal with. With each new customer, you need to organize their personal information, order details, shipping history, and more. If you’re expanding your team at the same time, you have to manage who has access to that increase of data.

Data Accessibility Challenges

How can you access your old data if you store it somewhere else? You need to make sure your team will still be able to access the data they need, right when they need it. You also want to make sure your team can only access data that pertains to them. Not only does this help from a data security point, but it also reduces the need for your teams to sift through unnecessary and irrelevant data to find what they’re looking for.

You should also think about the knowledge you lose as legacy systems age. It’s common for the people who know how to use the legacy systems to retire or move on to other jobs. Knowledge gets lost, making it harder for new employees to access historical data, even when they have the technical permissions to do so.

Solve These Problems with Legacy Data Access with eOne Solutions

Migrate, integrate, and manage your legacy data with the eOne iPaaS. Tackle data migration for legacy systems with SmartConnect. Easily build and monitor integrations with our simple drag-and-drop mapping, and manipulate and bring in data from all your favorite sources

Popdock allows you to display real-time data from one system within another with virtual integration. Say goodbye to the headaches of storing years of irrelevant historical data in your new cloud-based system. Popdock allows you to display historical on-premise data in any cloud system. Systems like:

  • D365 Business Central
  • D365 Finance and Operations
  • Sage Intacct
  • Oracle NetSuite
  • Acumatica
  • And many more!

Managing your legacy data effectively involves thinking through security risks, adopting modern technology, and making sure your team has the access and tools they need to succeed. Please contact us if you have any questions on how eOne can help with legacy data migration and integration.