Eight out of ten British companies report that efforts to develop agile IT infrastructure is being hampered by their reliance on legacy systems.

Research undertaken by IT consultancy group Atos Origin in conjunction with trade group, the National Computing Centre, revealed the extent to which UK firms rely on legacy systems: a quarter of companies still run at least 50% of their critical systems on legacy infrastructure. The survey revealed that 79% believed that legacy systems were hampering efforts to align business and IT objectives.

Legacy systems are also imposing additional costs, as years of ad hoc upgrades make them more expensive to maintain and more difficult to integrate with other systems, according to 64% of the companies surveyed.

To rectify this problem, Tony Virdi, Atos Origin’s director of systems integration recommends companies assess their whole IT estate then “identify those applications that are critical and those that are not and then define a roadmap to rationalise the applications and so reduce the maintenance costs and operational risk which increases business agility.”

Most organisations surveyed are in the process of re-architecting their systems to make them more flexible and better equipped to deal with business change.