Get a clear picture of your legacy systems.

This article reports that regulatory issues are forcing IT managers to dig into legacy systems to find out which applications, operating systems and bolt-ons are really running the business. It may come as a surprise to some IT departments, but the average age of applications that run core business processes is 15 years old. A survey by HAL Knowledge Solutions SpA found that almost 30% of companies are maintaining software up to 25 years old. Legacy applications are commonly seen as a burden— a constant cycle of updates and maintenance where dedicated, highly skilled IT staff have to keep the heterogeneous mix of proprietary code up to date.