For enterprises today, modernising legacy systems is no longer just a technology upgrade—it holds the key to unlocking the full potential of AI, Data, and Advanced Analytics. Whether it’s optimising decision-making, streamlining business processes, or enabling real-time insights, upgrading legacy systems is critical for staying competitive in an increasingly AI-driven world.
At Merit, we bring an AI-first approach to “Modernise, Optimise, and Scale”, ensuring that modernisation is not just about replacing outdated systems but creating future-ready platforms designed to power innovation and efficiency.
This blog explores five key roadblocks that often stall modernisation efforts and touches upon how Merit’s tailored, scalable solutions help enterprises overcome these challenges to achieve tangible results. We have published a series of blogs on legacy modernisation and key best practices to make it work.
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Challenge #1: Complex IT Landscapes: Simplifying the ‘Untangle’ Process
Legacy systems are often built over decades and, therefore, built using legacy programming languages. Also, as new features and enhancements get added, siloed systems get patched together – sometimes without proper strategic thinking.
Untangling the complexity of legacy systems can feel daunting, with interdependencies and redundant processes adding layers of difficulty.
Most Common Challenges Include:
- Legacy programming languages like SAS, Perl, or older SQL frameworks are used which do not have the right libraries or require complex and time-consuming programming to adapt AI, ML or modern data engineering use cases.
- Disjointed application and data ecosystems, where siloed applications create inconsistencies, duplicate efforts, and hinder real-time insights.
- The complexity and costs of maintaining legacy systems create a significant bottleneck.
- Internal resistance to change, skill gaps, and a lack of expertise in modern technologies slow down modernisation efforts.
- An unclear transition plan, including training and change management roadmaps with measurable metrics, hampers business-as-usual operations and increases the risk of disruptions.
Merit’s Approach to Untangling This Complexity:
- Strategic Consulting Framework: We begin with a strategic fitment analysis to assess how modernisation aligns with business goals and long-term IT strategy. Our approach includes using case definition to identify high-impact opportunities, a structured roadmap to guide execution, and a change management alignment plan to ensure smooth adoption across teams. This ensures modernisation is not just a technical upgrade but a transformation that delivers measurable business value.
- Future State Design: We define a modernisation blueprint that aligns with business and IT objectives, ensuring a seamless transition from legacy systems to AI-ready architectures.
- AI-Ready Architecture Frameworks: We leverage data frameworks like lakehouse, fabric, and mesh to modernise legacy systems into unified, scalable ecosystems seamlessly.
- Roadmap Definition: Our consulting framework roadmap ensures a phase wise modernisation plan taking into consideration training plans, shadow programming, and minimal disruption to BAU applications.
- AI-Driven Code Conversion: Our purpose-built conversion tools leverage OpenAI and open-source LLMs, enhanced by Merit’s proprietary prompt templates and best practice frameworks, to modernise legacy code efficiently. While automation accelerates the process, manual refinement ensures code quality, optimisation, and alignment with business needs, delivering a scalable and high-performance modernisation outcome.
- Future-Ready Design: Our solutions ensure your IT landscape is built to support AI-led process automation, intelligent interventions, and Agentic AI use cases.
Challenge #2: Internal Change Management is often a major blocker
Even the most robust technical plans and modernisation roadmaps can fail without organisational alignment. Resistance to change, insufficient communication, and inadequate training often stall progress.
Modernisation becomes easier when all key stakeholders realise that a legacy system(s) is a major blocker to progress on critical business initiatives and is slowing down operational processes.
Most Common Challenges Include:
- Stakeholders perceive modernisation as a cost rather than an investment.
- Misaligned priorities between IT teams and business leaders.
- Lack of readiness among end-users to adopt new systems.
- Legacy systems often appear functional due to established processes, but in reality, they are inefficient, outdated, and persist only because users are accustomed to them.
- Existing team skill sets don’t align with modern tech stacks.
Merit’s Approach
- Stakeholder Engagement: We involve key decision-makers and end-users early to build alignment and trust.
- Clear Communication: ROI-focused messaging and roadmap to deliver quick wins demonstrate the value of modernisation.
- Tailored Training Programs: Comprehensive training ensures teams are prepared to leverage modern systems effectively.
Challenge #3: Lack of Business Case Fitment to Strategic Needs
Many modernisation projects fail to get off the ground due to unclear ROI or an inability to create urgency. Without a compelling business case, leadership buy-in becomes an uphill battle.
As per Gartner’s 2024 CIO Survey, the top business reasons to modernise are the following:
- Business Fit: Align technology with strategic goals.
- Business Value: Unlock efficiency and drive outcomes.
- Agility: Adapt quickly to market changes.
In addition to the above business reasons, there are also the following IT-led reasons to modernise:
- Cost: Reduce the total cost of ownership.
- Complexity: Simplify systems and integrations.
- Risk: Address security and compliance vulnerabilities.
By explaining the need to modernise using the above six drivers, leaders spearheading transformation efforts can secure buy-in from other key stakeholders.
Most Common Challenges Include:
- Companies often focus on immediate OpEx savings rather than long-term transformation benefits. Justifying the CapEx needed for modernisation is not easy.
- Lack of urgency due to the absence of visible short-term benefits.
- Disconnect between IT transformation goals and business outcomes.
Merit’s Approach:
- Cost-Benefit Analysis: We quantify the hidden costs of legacy systems, including inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
- Quick Wins: Focused, phased modernisation roadmaps to deliver early results, creating momentum for broader modernisation efforts.
- Strategic Roadmap: Our plans align modernisation goals with measurable business objectives, driving urgency and leadership buy-in.
Challenge #4: Data Silos & Integration Challenges
Siloed data across legacy systems creates significant barriers to modernisation. Integrating or migrating these data sources into modern data platforms is critical for enabling advanced analytics and AI workflows.
As enterprises start their modernisation plans, it is important to “bring in” data residing in legacy systems if legacy data is needed for data analytics, reporting, or AI/ML model building. Setting up the data engineering for this, including establishing data pipelines and using the right architecture pattern, and the right archiving process, is critical for robust modernisation.
Most Common Challenges Include:
- Fragmented data hinder progress on AI and analytics capabilities
- Data duplication often results in different versions of truth, and there is a struggle to identify which is the “true” version
- Difficulty integrating siloed data with modern cloud-native systems.
- Inability to operationalise AI/ML models due to disconnected workflows.
Merit’s Approach:
- Unified Ecosystems: We enable seamless integration and migration of siloed data into AI-ready data platforms like Lakehouse and Data Mesh.
- Middleware Solutions: Proven tools standardise and integrate data across systems for compatibility and efficiency.
- Optimised Workflows: By connecting fragmented data, we unlock real-time insights and predictive analytics.
Challenge #5: Compliance & Security Concerns
Modernisation projects often expose legacy systems to vulnerabilities, while navigating stringent regulatory requirements adds complexity.
Most Common Challenges Include:
- Increased security risks during migration and integration.
- Evolving compliance requirements, such as GDPR or HIPAA.
- Lack of automated data governance and data management frameworks.
Merit’s Approach:
- Data Engineering Expertise: We bring to the fore proven expertise in data engineering and data management, planning for both short-term and long-term modernisation needs.
- Integrated DevSecOps Framework: We embed security best practices into every phase of modernisation, from code conversion to deployment.
- Automated Compliance Tools: Advanced governance tools ensure adherence to industry regulations.
- CI/CD Pipelines: Automated workflows reduce vulnerabilities and enhance security while enabling faster, more reliable releases.
Why Merit for Legacy Modernisation?
Breaking through modernisation roadblocks requires a strategic partner with proven modernisation methodology and approaches that can be adopted across industries and cloud platforms.
It also requires deep expertise in modern system architectures, automated code conversion capabilities, testing, data engineering, and a deep understanding of organisational challenges.
At Merit, we bring to the fore the following key capabilities:
- Consulting Framework for fitment analysis
- Pre-built and customisable AI-ready architecture frameworks
- Expertise in setting up data platforms (Lakehouse, Fabric, Mesh, Cloud Data Warehouses), data engineering and data management
- Proven code conversion utilities supporting the conversion of Perl, SAS, legacy SQL to Python, and the latest SQL versions
- Decision-making on what must be rebuilt, rearchitected, or refactored
- Prompt libraries and frameworks for best practice adoption as code gets refactored
- Test Automation workflows and utilities to ensure post-modernisation glitches are ironed out ahead of time
- DevSecOps Frameworks
By tailoring our approach to each organisation’s needs, Merit guarantees significant time and cost savings. Our clients have achieved up to 50% faster modernisation timelines and 40-70% effort reduction in testing and deployment, delivering transformative results with minimal disruption.
Ready to transform your legacy systems into future-ready platforms?