A legacy technology is an old technique, system, computer system, or application program that goes on to be applied, generally as it runs yet for the users' necessitates, still fresher technology or more effective techniques of executing a project are available right away. A legacy technology may have processes or terminology which are no longer applicable in the current circumstance, and may block or baffle realizing of the ways or methods used.
Organizations can have obliging causes for having a legacy technology, such as:
The technology works satisfactorily, and the proprietor considers no causes for altering it.
The expenses of redesigning or substituting the system are prohibitory as it is large, massive, and/or composite.
Retraining on a newly technology would be more expensive in bewildered time and money, equated to the expected appreciable gains of altering it.
The technology needs near fixed accessibility, so it could not be assumed out of service, and the expense of designing a new technology with a alike accessibility degree is high. Exemplifications include technologies to cover clients' accounts in banks, computer booking systems, air traffic handling, energy department (power grids), nuclear power plants, armed forces defense integrations, and technologies like the TOPS database.
The method that the technology works is not enough good realized. This kind of position can happen when the designers of the technology have imparted the company and the organization has either not been completely authenticated or documentation has been disoriented.
The user anticipates that the technology could easily be substituted when this gets essential.
Legacy technologies are assumed to be potentially problematical by few software engineers for various causes:
Legacy technologies often carry on disused (and generally dumb) hardware, and extra parts for these computers might get growingly difficult to get.
If legacy technology runs on antediluvian hardware only, the expense of holding the technology might finally outbalance the expense of altering both the software and hardware until more or less form of emulation or rearwards compatibility grants the software to run on newly hardware.
These technologies could be hard to assert, ameliorate, and flourish as there is a universal deficiency of realizing of the technology; the staffs who were specialists on it have adjourned or disremembered what they experienced about it, and staff who enrolled the area after it turned "legacy" never heard about it in the first lay. This could be declined by deficiency or loss of documentation. A territorial airline kicked its CEO in 2004 due to the loser of an antediluvian legacy crew programming technology that campaigned into a restriction not known to anyone in the organization.
Legacy technologies might have exposures in earlier operating systems or applications due to deficiency of security dapples being uncommitted or used. There could also be production conformations that cause security issues. These problems can put the legacy technology at chance of being settled by attackers or well-educated insiders.
Consolidation with new technologies might also be hard as newly software might use totally unlike systems. The type of bridge hardware and software that turns useable for unlike technologies that are democratic at the same time are frequently not formulated for disagreeing technologies in different times, as of the deficiency of a large requirement for it and the deficiency of related honour of a big market economies of scale, whilst more or less of this "glue" does acquire formulated by sellers and fanciers of specific legacy technologies.
