Why Technology Archaeology is the key to successful Digital Transformation

Out with the old, in with the new

Technological developments are occurring rapidly. In the blink of an eye what was once new and fashionable, has become outdated and replaced by something else. There’s no completion date on digital transformation, it’s a continuous process. New systems are regularly adopted, while old ones are phased out, as businesses try to keep pace with competitors and changing customer demands.

This continuous approach to transformation is challenging for IT leaders to manage, especially for organisations that have got limited resources. In many larger organisations there are complex layers of legacy technologies and systems that have built up over the years – all of which need to be unpicked during the transformation process.

As a result, projects can overrun both in time and budget or be cut completely due to conflicting business priorities, this can lead to complex architecture straddling various environments. That means there’s often a blend of older, mission critical, on-premise systems, and a range of hybrid cloud-hosted and SaaS capabilities that aren’t easily monitored, managed, or secured by legacy on-premises tools.

At the root of this complexity is the different systems that have accumulated over time. Organisations need better visibility, understanding and awareness of these layers in order to have a clear, successful digital transformation plan.

A journey into your technology archaeology

Technology archaeology for an IT team is the layers of IT processes and systems of a business. However, there’s various factors like staff turnover and lacking or low-quality documentation of systems which mean this knowledge is rarely in one place or well-known to those that need to know it best – the IT and security teams.

To tackle this, IT teams need to take a deep dive into their organisation’s technology archaeology in order to understand how their systems are running and working together. To gain full comprehension of IT operations and systems, teams will have to do a thorough hygiene check, assessing the state of every IT asset a business owns. This will include asking questions such as:

· What can we get rid of vs what can we keep but modify for efficiency? To distinguish which systems can be kept and which can be deleted it’s important to assess how everything is connected. If you shift or dispose of one system will it affect any others? Additionally, if any systems are outdated, and they’re no longer supported by vendors or internal suppliers, you should consider disposing of them.

· Is there anything predecessors or external professionals may have put in place that is not known, remembered or on file? If so, this may have resulted in assets which have remained unused due to IT management being too dependent on manual processes during ‘get things done’ periods.

And finally,

· Will any changes I make impact the user experience for remote workers?

Don’t let your complexity defeat you

What proves to be a continuous challenge for IT teams is managing the balancing act that needs to take place between emerging tech and a business’ legacy system. The existence of the latter often makes it difficult to do the impact reports required for transformation projects. It’s often not clear how co-dependent systems really are. There can even be the dangerous possibility that a system that no one was aware of is consuming mounds of company data. Or when digital transformation projects are started, the vulnerabilities and failings within organisations’ legacy systems can be uncovered.

These are all real risks and can be avoided if businesses collaborate better with their IT teams – they need to know what digitisation projects are planned across the business, regardless of how big or small. Ultimately, if a better understanding of a business’ technology architecture exists, especially before transformation projects are started, this can also act as a preventative measure to these dangers.

Prioritising Visibility

As the pandemic continues to unfold, organisations will keep digitally transforming in response to the challenges the year may present and the opportunities it may hold. Therefore, it is important that IT teams are equipped with the visibility and the understanding needed to successfully help the roll out of digital transformation projects. In addition to visibility, security should also be high on the agenda. A recent study from Tanium shows there is significant room for improvement in both areas, with over half of those surveyed in the study (53%) saying they believe the lack of visibility into their network leaves them vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Thus, prioritising both is a necessity since – as the last year has shown – crisis can strike when least expected and can be crippling. Constant visibility and a thorough understanding of an organisation’s technology archaeology is a must in the process of staying prepared and providing defence in a time of such uncertainty.