The IT systems that governments and businesses depend on are often decades old and prone to failure. Why do they cost trillions to maintain but are so hard to modernize?
Water treatment plants, telephone exchanges, power grids, and air traffic control are just a few of the systems controlled by antiquated code.
Does everybody agree on what legacy IT is? What counts as legacy? It seems that there is not even a standard definition. About the closest that we come to is that it’s a system that does not meet the business need for some reason.
The problems associated with legacy systems will only worsen as the Internet of Things. Now imagine a not-too-distant future where hundreds of millions or even billions of legacy IoT devices are deeply embedded into government and commercial offices, schools, hospitals, factories, homes, and even people.
Here are some articles on the issues around those legacy systems:
Legacy system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_system
Inside the Hidden World of Legacy IT Systems
How and why we spend trillions to keep old software going
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/inside-hidden-world-legacy-it-systems
The Problem of Old Code and Older Coders
Legacy IT systems are everywhere—and they need help
https://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/computing/it/the-problem-of-old-code-and-older-coders
Why Software Fails
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/why-software-fails
No Internet of Things without strong cyber security
https://www.datarespons.com/cybersecurity/
2 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Modernizing legacy software code is a tedious task that IBM chief scientist Ruchir Puri says AI can take on
IBM Watson’s Next Challenge: Modernize Legacy Code
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/machine-learning/ibm-ai-watson-modernize-legacy-code
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apologists for proprietary software like to say, “free software is a nice dream, but we all know that only the proprietary system can produce reliable products. A bunch of hackers just can’t do this.”
Empirical evidence disagrees, however; scientific tests, described below, have found GNU software to be more reliable than comparable proprietary software.
Free Software is More Reliable!
https://www.gnu.org/software/reliability.en.html
Apologists for proprietary software like to say, “free software is a nice dream, but we all know that only the proprietary system can produce reliable products. A bunch of hackers just can’t do this.”
Empirical evidence disagrees, however; scientific tests, described below, have found GNU software to be more reliable than comparable proprietary software.
This should not be a surprise; there are good reasons for the high reliability of GNU software, good reasons to expect free software will often (though not always) have high reliability.
These researchers found that the commercial Unix systems had a failure rate that ranged from 15% to 43%. In contrast, the failure rate for GNU was only 7%.
Miller also said that, “the three commercial systems that we compared in both 1990 and 1995 noticeably improved in reliability, but still had significant rates of failure (the basic utilities from GNU/Linux still were noticeably better than those of the commercial systems).”