Our Blog Posts

Jun 2025

Legacy systems often represent decades of investment and the institutional memory of an organisation. Yet the very reliability that once made them indispensable can now hold innovation hostage. The challenge is clear: evolve technology without pressing the pause button on day‑to‑day operations. Below is a roadmap that has helped engineering leaders modernise core platforms while keeping revenue‑critical services online.,Before choosing tools or refactoring code, articulate what modernisation must achieve:,Align the programme with one or two high‑value outcomes and use them to prioritise every technical decision that follows.,A "big‑bang" cut‑over is rarely feasible; the blast radius is simply too large. Instead, treat modernisation as a living programme with measurable milestones.,Coined by Martin Fowler, this pattern surrounds the legacy core with new, modular services. Over time those services “strangle” outdated functionality until the old system can be switched off gracefully.,Isolate → Replace → Retire.,Before rewriting code, expose stable contracts by wrapping critical functions with REST/GraphQL APIs. This creates a buffer so consumers are unaffected while you re‑engineer the internals.,Lift‑and‑shift is not modernisation—but containerising workloads can buy breathing room. Running COBOL or monolithic Java apps inside containers standardises deployment, adds observability hooks, and positions you for cloud migration.,Move data domains, not whole databases. Use change‑data‑capture (CDC) streams so both legacy and new stores stay in sync until a cut‑over is safe.,Careful selection avoids swapping one form of lock‑in for another.,Structure teams around business capabilities (payments, search, loyalty) instead of technology layers. Each team owns its roadmap, code, and runtime metrics end‑to‑end.,A central platform team curates paved‑road tooling—CI templates, observability bundles, golden container images—so feature teams stay focused on customer value.,A major U.S. airline relied on a 1990s mainframe to build daily pairings for more than 30,000 pilots and flight attendants. Any outage in the scheduler triggered cascading flight delays and customer‑service payouts averaging about $70,000/min.,Result: scheduling recompute time fell 60%, same‑day crew change processing dropped from 45 minutes to 5 minutes, and overtime costs shrank by $12 million in the first year.,Modernizing legacy systems is less about the shiny technology and more about continuous value delivery underpinned by ruthless risk management. When managed as a rolling program—with APIs as shock absorbers, DevOps as the engine, and small victories as fuel—you can evolve even the most mission‑critical mainframe without switching the lights off.,...

Jun 2025

Network hiccups rarely make headlines, but they quietly sap revenue and reputation. A 2025 benchmark shows network‑related outages cost small businesses an average of $1,203 per incident (CloudSecureTech, 2025) and Gartner pegs industry‑wide downtime at $5,600 per minute on the high end. Even a half‑hour hiccup can erase a week’s margins.,Throwing extra bandwidth or a new firewall at the symptom can even mask the real issue, driving up OPEX without curing instability. Root causes lurk in architecture, policy, and process.,Think of it as a 360° wellness exam—only for routers and cables instead of heartbeats:,Your mileage will vary, but numbers like these are typical of first‑year gains.,A stable, secure network is less a luxury and more the backbone of every SMB revenue stream. An unbiased Network Strategy Assessment shines a light on unseen break points and gives you a prioritized, budget‑aware plan to fix them—before the next outage invoices itself.,References,...