You Must Upgrade Your 16 Bit Applications

If you come to know that your company has such a vulnerability which can not only cripple but can kill your business, you will probably become serious. However, you will be even more surprised to know that this particular vulnerability is currently perceived as a strength by your company. The sad truth is that most of the companies rely on IT systems which might soon become obsolete, called legacy system in IT terms.

A legacy application is a type of software or application which serves a purpose but is completely backdated or obsolete. 16 bit applications, for example, are legacy applications because no computer uses 16 bit architecture anymore. These applications were developed by the companies when 16 bit architecture used to be the standard. With time, the architecture became more advanced, 32 bit, 64 bit and even 128 bit. The companies failed to upgrade the applications for two reasons, firstly they didn't want to disrupt the existing system which might have affected their revenue flow and secondly because they felt the application is serving the purpose and don't mend something which isn't broken.

Now we are in the era where mobile and cloud computing is the standard and thus, these 16 bit applications should really be upgraded to something modern. In fact, the support and the maintenance cost of these applications would only increase with time. You need to spend on keeping them compatible with modern computers and operating environment as well.