The True Cost of Legacy IT — Hidden Expenses Behind Outdated Systems

Legacy IT systems often appear stable on the surface, but they quietly drain budgets and slow down organisations. This article explores the true cost of outdated infrastructure, revealing hidden expenses such as rising maintenance efforts, expensive specialist skills, security vulnerabilities, compliance risks and reduced productivity. It explains how legacy applications limit scalability, delay innovation and increase operational complexity over time. Readers will gain a clear understanding of why continuing to operate aging systems is rarely cost-neutral and how strategic archiving, system decommissioning or modernisation can significantly reduce risk, free resources and support a more agile, future-ready IT landscape.