Somehow you already know. But these five signs will hopefully lead to positive action to digitalize and monetize your data.

Despite all the talk about “data-driven decisions,” one thing is often neglected: making sure the data is actually ready to ‘drive”.

Too many companies continue to cling to their legacy IT systems, even when those systems no longer fit the business. Outdated data management solutions require IT teams to spend valuable time maintaining and troubleshooting, and also prevent organizations from getting the most out of their data. On top of this time-consuming management, relying on legacy technology can increase vulnerability to serious risk factors—from customer dissatisfaction to security breaches.

So, how can you tell that your organization has outgrown your legacy data management system? How do you know that it is time for a change? Here are five strong signals.

1. Unnecessary complexity has you spinning your wheels
Legacy data management often entails a complicated, multi-tiered architecture that results in siloed data and disorganization. As a result, maintenance requires a lot of manual work. These are some of the signs that you’re mired neck-deep in unnecessary complexity:

  • Your team is spending excessive time administrating and managing the platform  
  • Your team breached SLAs for mission critical services
  • Your team continues to spend additional costs on 3rd party software and services to address short comings

These are all signs of an inefficient operationally-challenged environment. By moving to an up-to-date unified data management platform, real companies are seeing a 90% reduction in backup management.

2. Lack of innovation is hindering your business

Your legacy vendor is not rolling out new features or enhancing existing ones to support your business. This may be happening out of technology debt with lack of innovation—or worse, because you are using a system that is no longer actively supported.

We find that one of the biggest visible signs of this is a lack of application programming interface compatibility, resulting in clunky integrations and poor automation capabilities.

More than likely, your team members know which tools they want to use—but they may not be able to integrate them easily, or at all, with your legacy data management system. So, while the bigger players in your industry are using the latest software solutions to stay ahead of the game and ensure optimal efficiency, you are stuck using an old, inefficient system. This can be a significant setback for a business that wants to stay competitive and agile.

IT leaders can communicate with their CEOs and non-technical colleagues by framing this challenge in terms of falling market share. It is hard to argue that nimble and well-equipped IT teams are not central to ensuring consistent quality in both product and support. If formerly loyal customers are switching to a competitor, legacy IT systems may be considered as ground zero.

3. Customer support has deteriorated

You need to move fast. Your legacy vendors’ slow service, especially poor recovery options in case of data loss, should not be a bottleneck. To gauge your current vendor’s service capabilities, ask yourself these questions:

  • How long does it take to recover VMs, SQL, and Oracle databases? (Answer: almost no time at all.)
  • How long are you waiting on data ingestion? And is that speed coming at the expense of restore performance?
  • How scared are you of bare-metal recovery? In case of an emergency, could you quickly restore in-place with the current operating system and critical data intact? Will your vendor give you the instant support you need, if and when you need it?

If your legacy data management vendor is unhelpful or slow in its responses to your support issues, or lacks these now-standard capabilities, it is time to move on.

4. TCO is high and pricing is not scalable

Legacy vendors often require complex pricing and licencing, as well as unpredictable pricing and renewals. In 2020, you should settle for nothing less than transparent, simplified, predictable, and flexible pricing. It should include all necessary hardware and support, as well as the perpetual life of device licences. You should be able to refresh to next-generation appliance without re-buying.

Modern data management should also enable your IT organization to centralize your data management and drastically reduce your overall data center footprint by 70%+ and drive 30%+ total cost of ownership savings.

5. You are encountering additional pressure to elevate security

When speaking with our own customers, we have found that many legacy vendors do not provide the robust security measures required for today’s fragmented, cloud-driven IT environments. With privacy standards such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, secure data management is more important than ever before. If it has not already, your legacy solution is likely to further compound security risks by forcing you to cobble together multiple point solutions across your architecture.

Modernizing to Cloud Data Management

It is understandable—revamping your entire data management solution seems like a daunting process. You have seen all these signs, but the thought of change is already giving you a headache.

But before you commit to another year of outdated backup, consider outfitting your team with a cloud data management solution.

New customers can get up and running in under an hour. Simply determine what policies to apply to your applications, and the right vendor should be able to take care of the rest.