Despite all the talk about “data-driven decisions,” one thing is often neglected: making sure the data is actually ready to “drive.”

Too many companies continue to cling to their legacy IT systems, even when those systems no longer fit the business. Outdated data management solutions require IT teams to spend valuable time maintaining and troubleshooting, and also prevent organizations from getting the most out of their data. On top of this time-consuming management, relying on legacy technology can increase vulnerability to serious risk factors—from customer dissatisfaction to security breaches.

So, how can you tell that you’ve outgrown your legacy data management system and that it’s time for a change? Here are five strong signals.

  1. Unnecessary Complexity Has You Spinning Your Wheels

Legacy data management often entails a complicated, multi-tiered architecture that results in siloed data and disorganization. As a result, maintenance requires a lot of manual work. These are some of the signs that you’re mired neck-deep in unnecessary complexity:

  • Your team spends time devising workarounds for software or designing workflows specifically to accommodate a legacy technology’s capabilities.
  • Your team has created a Frankenstein-like combination of supplemental software to make up for the shortcomings of your legacy system
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  • Your team has missed deadlines because the software needed to be patched or fixed to accomplish a task.

These are all inefficient ways to spend hours. By moving to an up-to-date unified data management platform, real companies are seeing a 90 percent reduction in backup management.

  1. Lack of Innovation Is Hindering your Business

Your legacy vendor is not rolling out new features or enhancing existing ones to support your business. This might be happening out of complacency—or worse, because you’re using a system that’s no longer actively supported.

We find that one of the biggest visible signs of this is a lack of API compatibility, resulting in clunky integrations and poor automation capabilities.

More than likely, your team members know which tools they want to use—but they might not be able to integrate them easily, or at all, with your legacy data management system. So, while the bigger players in your industry are using the latest software solutions to stay ahead of the game and ensure optimal efficiency, you’re stuck using an old, inefficient system. This can be a significant setback  for a business that wants to stay competitive and agile.

IT leaders can communicate with their CEOs and non-technical colleagues by framing this challenge in terms of falling market share. It’s hard to argue that nimble and well-equipped IT teams are not central to ensuring consistent quality in both product and support. If formerly loyal customers are switching to a competitor, legacy IT systems might be ground zero.

  1. Customer Support Has Deteriorated

You need to move fast. Your legacy vendors’ slow service, especially poor recovery options in case of data loss, should not be a bottleneck. To gauge your current vendor’s service capabilities, ask yourself these questions:

  • How long does it take to recover VMs, SQL, and Oracle databases? (The answer should be almost no time at all.)
  • How long are you waiting on data ingestion? And is that speed coming at the expense of restore performance?
  •  How scared are you of bare-metal recovery? In case of an emergency, could you quickly restore in-place with the current operating system and critical data intact? Will your vendor give you the instant support you need, if and when you need it?

If your legacy data management vendor is unhelpful or slow in its responses to your support issues or lacks these now-standard capabilities, it’s time to move on.

  1. TCO Is High & Pricing Is Not Scalable

Legacy vendors often require complex pricing and licensing, as well as unpredictable pricing and renewals. In 2020, you should settle for nothing less than transparent, simplified, predictable, and flexible pricing. It should include all necessary hardware and support, as well as the perpetual life of device licenses. You should be able to refresh to next-generation appliance without re-buying.

Modern data management should also enable your IT organization to centralize your data management and drastically reduce your overall data center footprint. With Rubrik, many of our customers are able to reduce their footprint by 70%+ and drive 30%+ TCO savings.

  1. You’re Encountering Additional Pressure to Elevate Security

When speaking with our own customers, we’ve found that many legacy vendors do not provide the robust security measures required for today’s fragmented, cloud-driven IT environments. With privacy standards such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, secure data management is more important than ever before. If it hasn’t already, your legacy solution is likely to further compound security risks by forcing you to cobble together multiple point solutions across your architecture. 

Rubrik was built to ensure that data is managed in a secure and responsible manner, independent of its location. Our platform delivers end-to-end encryption (both at-rest and in-flight) across all environments, while also storing all data as immutable objects. This means that once the backup completes, you can rest assured that this data can be restored in its original state. 

Rubrik Polaris Radar, an app built on our innovative Rubrik Polaris SaaS platform, also helps you increase resilience against the rising threat of ransomware. With Radar, track how your data changes over time so that when an attack happens, you can quickly recover from ransomware to the most recent clean state. To accelerate the discovery of an attack’s impact, Radar also provides insights into how data changed at the time of the event.

We Make it Easy to Switch

We get it—revamping your entire data management solution seems like a daunting process. You’ve seen all these signs, but the thought of change is already giving you a headache. But before you commit to another year of outdated backup, consider outfitting your team with Rubrik Cloud Data Management. New customers typically are up and running in under an hour. Simply determine what policies to apply to your applications, and Rubrik takes care of the rest.