Legacy application

What is Legacy Application?
An older application is a software application that is considered obsolete or based on technology that is older than a current standard.

The term 'legacy technology' can refer to applications, platforms, hardware setups, programming languages, and other technologies that have been superseded by newer options. That said, much of the discussion about legacy applications and legacy technology revolves around updating what is being used by a particular end user or enterprise client.

Experts often discuss legacy applications or legacy systems where data and tools are migrated from older to newer technologies. The level of difficulty largely depends on how the older systems and the newer systems were built - whether they were built with the ability to easily upgrade and migrate.

An example of migrating legacy systems - and one that affects the migration of older legacy systems - is using newer operating systems. As device operating systems evolve quickly, older versions keep getting out of date. Users and technology managers need to worry about how to continually migrate applications and data through successive versions of operating systems. This may be easy in some ways, but difficult or almost impossible in others. Migration can be extremely labor intensive and it can involve transferring data one bit or element at a time.
Migrating legacy applications and legacy systems is critical to corporate IT management. Organizations need to assess the cost of migration and how it will be effectively implemented. You need to identify legacy systems and evaluate legacy applications and technologies to determine if they are really out of date or if they will persist for a short period of time. This is the responsibility of overall IT planners such as chief information officers and others involved in executive-level planning.