Legacy and agile threaten digital transformation success

New research from CAST shows that legacy prevails; Agile is not the silver bullet it was promised to be.

CAST has published new research evaluating the impact of application age on software performance and business outcomes. The Software Intelligence Report on Application Age identifies two primary outcomes of old vs. new software that’s still in use today:
  • Older applications are far more likely to impact service continuity in the event of a production failure. Over 75% of applications from the 1980’s have a critical impact on business operations if they go down, compared to just under 50% of those written in this decade.

  • The shift toward Agile development teams might not be helping organizations modernize as quickly as the industry anticipated. According to the report, Software Agility is the only health factor that does not show a continuous improvement trend over time. In fact, applications released over the past 10 years score lower than applications released in the 1980s.

“Enterprise applications are often laden with software risk, as different pieces of functionality have been tacked-on over time. Without adequate Software Intelligence, it is very difficult for executives to get an accurate assessment of resilience and agility risk,” said Michael Muller, Product Owner for CAST Highlight and co-author of the report. “Smaller development teams and faster release cycles improve immediate outcomes for end-users, but without active portfolio-level management Agile teams can turn the codebase into a legacy headache for the next CIO.”

“IT still struggles to transform an aging, monolithic app-centric environment into a nimble, outcome-driven engine needed to drive digital business,” said Dan Hebda, Chief Strategy Officer at MEGA, who also contributed to the report. “In MEGA’s experience, those most successful in modernizing their infrastructure start with IT portfolio management to establish a baseline of Software Intelligence. This includes aligning resources to business outcomes, reducing infrastructure complexity, understanding technical debt and opening the road to accelerated innovation and growth.”

The Software Intelligence Report on Application Age looks at 2,067 applications, representing 733 million lines of code from 14 different technologies that are developed and maintained by more than 12,000 people across multiple verticals. To conduct the analysis, these applications were anonymized and scanned by CAST Highlight, the company’s SaaS-based application portfolio analysis solution.

Check Point and Lakera have launched the b3 benchmark to enhance LLM security in AI agents,...
Hammerspace unveils an innovative solution enhancing AI applications by leveraging existing data...
AI boosts productivity for UK enterprises, yet most are not fully leveraging its potential. Key...
Chelsea FC and FPT announce a wider partnership, with FPT becoming a Principal Partner through...
NTT DATA's acquisition of Alchemy reinforces its strategy of innovating and modernising the global...
Slalom's latest AI Insights Survey unveils disparities between executive AI enthusiasm and...
Twilio's latest updates introduce new data capabilities to refine customer interactions through...
Wavenet partners with 8x8, marking a leap in enterprise communications and customer experience....