​Why Legacy Modernization Fails

Innovation​Why Legacy Modernization FailsByIgor Fedulov,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 03, 2026, 10:15am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Igor Fedulov is CEO of Intersog. gettyAs the CEO of a company that helps organizations modernize complex technology environments, I’ve sat across from too many tech leaders who look exhausted. One line from a CTO has stuck with me: “Half of our team wasn’t even born when our system was written. Now, we’re spending almost six months fixing one bug.”You shouldn’t be maintaining code older than your developers. Yet, for many enterprises, that’s exactly the reality. In many enterprises, up to 70% of IT budgets are still consumed by maintenance rather than innovation.The pain runs deeper than just costs. Outdated systems create security vulnerabilities, slow down decision making and frustrate talented engineers who joined to build the future, not patch the past. Meanwhile, the global legacy software modernization market continues to grow rapidly.COBOL, a programming language from the 1950s, still processes an estimated $3 trillion in financial transactions every day. The average COBOL programmer is 55 to 58 years old, and roughly 10% of that workforce retires each year, with replacements nearly impossible to find. Several major banks and insurers have experienced painful disruptions while attempting to modernize or scale their decades-old COBOL systems, resulting in locked-out customers, frozen payments, delayed claims and millions in added costs.I’ve heard CTOs describe the quiet dread of knowing a single failure in an undocumented mainframe could cascade into millions in lost revenue or regulatory penalties. Engineers burn out maintaining spaghetti code, while competitors ship in...