A survey of 500 IT professionals in the U.S. published today finds the top five biggest challenges encountered when managing legacy software are security vulnerabilities (43%), followed closely by incompatibility with modern systems or tools (41%), limited scalability (40%), high maintenance/support costs (39%) and lack of vendor support or updates (32%).

Conducted by Researchscape International on behalf of Saritasa, a provider of software development services, the survey also finds that 62% of respondents are still managing some type of legacy platform, with more than two-thirds of respondents (68%) reporting those platforms are managed by an internal IT team. Compared to 20% that rely on a vendor and 7% that rely on an external services provider.

The primary reasons cited for not replacing these systems are because it still works (50%), followed by budget limitations (44%), fear of disrupting operations (38%), data migration concerns (35%), lack of internal support for modernization (30%) and lack of a clear return on investment (ROI).

Sabrina Froehlich, customer success manager for Saritasa, said the survey makes it apparent that organizations are continuing to rely on legacy platforms because of both simple inertia and the cost of migrating to a new platform in near equal measures. As a result, there tends to be a lot more interest in, at least to some extent, modernizing existing platforms versus replacing them, she added.

In fact, the survey finds that when asked what their top priorities for modernizing a legacy platform, the top goals identified by survey respondents are improved performance or speed (48%), followed by cloud-based or remote access (45%), greater scalability/flexibility (44%), integration with modern tools (44%) and enhanced security (42%).

It’s not clear to what degree IT teams are actually modernizing legacy systems versus simply maintaining them, but the older a platform runs, the more challenging it becomes to support, especially if it was built using tools and frameworks that not many software developers today may be as familiar with as when an application might have been first deployed. The narrower the pool of available talent the more expensive it tends to be to maintain a legacy platform, which often results in organizations contracting with firms such as Saritasa to update their legacy applications or replace them altogether, noted Froehlich.

Unfortunately, IT teams and business leaders are not always making decisions for the right reasons, she added. Business leaders are often trying to contain or defer costs by delaying upgrades even though that usually means higher security risks because legacy code tends to have more known vulnerabilities that might be exploited. IT teams, meanwhile, might be resistant to adopting a new platform that may not require as much specialized expertise to manage out of fear they might be replaced.

Of course, it’s only a matter of time before legacy platforms are either updated or replaced. The only thing that is uncertain is how much time, toil and effort will be put into maintaining that legacy application that with each passing day becomes only that much more costly to maintain.