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Some critical systems are still running while the pool of people able to maintain them is shrinking. That creates a real continuity risk—but retirement alone does not mean a system will fail, and the problem is not limited to knowing an old programming language. Organizations also need to preserve the system-specific rules, operating procedures, and recovery knowledge that keep essential services working.
Why old systems still matter
Legacy systems are not necessarily obsolete in the sense of being unused. In a 2025 review of 69 federal legacy IT systems, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified 11 as most in need of modernization. Those systems support essential functions including health care, tax processing, critical infrastructure, and national security. GAO also reported that the government spends over $100 billion on IT each year, with most of it used to operate and maintain existing systems. GAO-25-107795
“Legacy” describes a mix of conditions, not one age or programming language. A system may be costly to maintain, difficult to update, vulnerable, dependent on unsupported components, or reliant on specialist knowledge. Some systems continue to perform their work reliably; that does not eliminate the risks created by aging technology or a shrinking support pool.
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In GAO’s sample, eight of the 11 most critical systems used outdated languages, four had unsupported hardware or software, and seven had known cybersecurity vulnerabilities. These are distinct problems: replacing a language does not automatically address unsupported infrastructure, and documenting expertise does not itself remediate a security flaw. GAO also found incomplete modernization planning among agencies responsible for many of the selected systems and recommended better planning. GAO-25-107795
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Language skills are only part of the handover
GAO says selected Treasury systems run COBOL and assembly, and describes the number of people with the needed skills as “dwindling.” It warns that a shortage of experts available to maintain a critical system creates significant mission risk. That finding concerns selected systems; it is not a count of all COBOL or mainframe specialists, nor proof that every organization faces the same shortage. GAO-25-107795
A new maintainer may know COBOL and still need to learn how a particular system behaves: which business rules are encoded in it, how batch jobs depend on one another, how data is formatted, what exceptions operators handle, and how the system is recovered after a disruption. That is a practical implication of system-specific maintenance, not a quantified finding about how much knowledge is undocumented or how often retirements cause outages.
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What workforce surveys say—and do not say
Kyndryl’s 2025 vendor-published survey found that 70% of surveyed organizations reported difficulty finding talent for mainframe modernization. Among all-industry respondents, 46% said new workforce entrants do not have mainframe skills, while 39% said staff are retiring and taking mainframe skills with them. These are survey respondent findings, not verified workforce counts or estimates that apply to every employer, geography, or legacy system. Kyndryl’s 2025 survey report
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How to keep knowledge from walking out the door
Knowledge transfer and modernization are complementary. A team can reduce dependence on individual experts while deciding whether the system should stay in place, move to a different environment, or be changed more extensively. The following practices are organizational guidance; GAO’s findings support the need for planning, but do not prescribe this exact checklist.
- Assign an accountable owner. Name the person or team responsible for the system, its dependencies, operational documentation, and transition decisions.
- Map the system and its dependencies. Record connected applications, data flows, batch schedules, external interfaces, infrastructure, and the teams that operate them.
- Pair experienced staff with successors. Use planned handovers and paired maintenance to expose newcomers to real changes, exceptions, and recovery tasks rather than relying on a language course alone.
- Write operational runbooks. Document routine procedures, monitoring, common failure modes, escalation routes, and recovery steps. Keep them current as the system changes.
- Capture the reasons behind important decisions. Record business rules and the rationale for unusual behavior where it can be found, and identify decisions that remain unclear rather than treating assumptions as fact.
- Plan a funded transition. Set out the work, ownership, dependencies, and decision points for knowledge transfer and any technical changes. Identify unsupported components, known vulnerabilities, recovery needs, and single points of expertise as separate risks.
Choosing between handover and modernization
There is no universal winner. The appropriate response depends on the system’s mission, technical condition, dependencies, available skills, cost, and the organization’s tolerance for change. A handover preserves knowledge around the current system; modernization changes its technology or implementation. The approaches can be sequenced or combined.
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| Approach | What changes | What it can preserve |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge transfer and operational documentation | Staff practices and recorded system knowledge | The current application and its existing operating environment |
| Rehosting or replatforming | The hosting environment or platform, with less change to application logic | More of the existing application logic and business behavior |
| Refactoring | The application implementation more substantially | Business requirements may remain, but more code and behavior need to be examined during the change |
AWS describes replatforming existing COBOL and PL/I applications separately from automated refactoring, illustrating that these are different modernization paths—not guarantees of lower cost or risk. AWS Mainframe Modernization guidance
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For a critical system, begin with evidence about the current state: what it supports, what is fragile or unsupported, who can maintain it, and how recovery works. That gives decision-makers a basis to choose between preserving the current system with stronger support, changing its platform, or changing its implementation more deeply.
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