We look at several signals: unpatchable security risk, frequent outages, runaway operating costs, difficulty hiring for the legacy tech stack, and how strongly the system blocks roadmap changes. If the system is stable, inexpensive to run, and not limiting the business, focused legacy maintenance may be the right call; otherwise, we propose phased modernization options with clear cost, risk, and value trade-offs.

Yes—this is exactly what our legacy application support offering is designed for. Our 90-day takeover plan includes reverse-engineering architecture and critical flows, instrumenting monitoring, documenting behavior, and identifying risks before we change anything. The goal is to replace “tribal knowledge” with shared, durable documentation and operational runbooks.

Technical debt is the accumulation of shortcuts, outdated dependencies, and architectural decisions that made sense once but now slow you down. In legacy systems, it shows up as high change risk, long lead times, fragile integrations, and difficulty hiring. We quantify that debt so you can decide whether to pay it down incrementally or budget for a more significant modernization effort.

We favor incremental strategies: stabilizing and documenting first, refactoring the riskiest areas, using the strangler pattern to peel off services, or migrating platforms in stages. This lets the existing legacy system continue to support the business while we steadily reduce risk, instead of betting everything on a multi-year rewrite that may slip or miss the mark.

Common paths include “stabilize and extend” for low-criticality systems, incremental refactoring with better tests and tooling, platform migrations (for example, from on-prem to cloud or from legacy .NET to .NET Core), targeted service extraction around high-value domains, and, in rare cases, full rewrites when there is no viable salvage path. We map each path to cost, risk, and business value so you can choose deliberately.

We connect technical realities to business outcomes: risk of outages and breaches, regulatory exposure, opportunity cost of a hard-to-change system, and total cost of ownership compared to modern alternatives. Combined with phased investment options, that analysis gives executives a clear picture of why legacy application modernization matters and how to approach it pragmatically.

A legacy system is software that still runs critical business processes but is built on older technologies, architectures, or practices. Organizations keep them because they work, they embody years of business logic, and replacing them feels risky. Legacy application support and modernization aims to reduce that risk gradually—stabilizing what exists while creating a realistic path to something more maintainable.

The strangler pattern is a modernization strategy where you gradually build new services around the edges of a legacy system and route specific functionality to them over time. As more capabilities move into the new architecture, the legacy system shrinks until it can be safely retired. It lets you modernize without a dangerous big-bang rewrite by delivering value incrementally and reducing risk step by step.