Legacy infrastructure slows AI adoption – RTInsights

AI is quickly becoming a key technology that is driving businesses to modernize key applications, yet there is a push to move away from legacy systems that are holding back progress.

According to the 2023 Rackspace Cloud Modernization Survey, 9 out of 10 respondents said that AI is a reason or the main reason for modernization. This reflects the increased interest in AI over the past few years, particularly with the recent rise of generative AI at the consumer and enterprise level. Businesses of all sizes are seeing the benefits that AI can bring to optimize security, efficiency and reduce costs.

However, legacy systems slow this pace, with the average respondent saying their company has 22 legacy systems or applications currently in use. More than half of them haven’t even considered moving away from these legacy systems, either because they absolutely need to have them or because they can’t find a like-for-like replacement.

One of the main reasons for the slowdown in modernization is a lack of expertise, with 24 percent not having the relevant in-house expertise and another eight percent not planning to use a managed services partner to help with the talent shortage.

See also: API Management: The Key to Modernizing Legacy IT Systems

Most business leaders know that in order to reap the benefits of AI, they need to get rid of legacy systems. There is also a time constraint, as businesses that take too long to transition will lose their advantage over competitors who have already switched.

This shows that even at the beginning of their cloud journey, the three critical applications organizations say they need to upgrade are really at the heart of the business, because they are both the most important things to modernize and the most challenging, Jeff DeWerter said. Chief Technology Evangelist at Rackspace Technology. At the same time, it’s encouraging to see leaders recognize that application innovation is key to taking advantage of advanced technologies. The prospect of losing AI may motivate organizations to finally step outside the box when it comes to modernizing core systems.

Regarding cloud adoption, there is roughly a division of organizations that operate in public cloud, private cloud, and non-cloud. In three years, 41% of businesses expect to operate in the public cloud, 48% in the private cloud, and only 11% outside of any cloud.

AI has had its ups and downs in terms of commercial benefits, but with the rise of predictive analytics and generative AI, some of these things seem to be still useful and of interest to organizations regardless of the hype. They are organizational level.