Modernize critical systems without stopping them

The consulting work produces decisions: an audit of what you run, a quantified view of cost and risk, and a roadmap that sequences the changes. The execution work then delivers those changes in production: migrating databases, decoupling applications, running the parallel-validation discipline until each switchover is safe. You can buy them separately. Some clients take the audit and roadmap and execute with their own teams; others bring us in for delivery on a plan they already trust. What stays constant is that both sides are staffed from the same engineering bench, so the recommendations are always ones the people writing them know how to build.

It depends on the size and criticality of the estate, but the shape is consistent. The audit takes four to eight weeks. A focused database migration, a single Oracle workload moving to PostgreSQL for example, typically lands within a few months of phased moves. A full enterprise program covering databases, applications and the integration layer spans several months to a couple of years, because each segment is validated against the legacy system before it moves permanently. Continuous modernization of a large live platform can run much longer: our engagement on the European Commission's audiovisual portal ran six years while the portal kept serving tens of millions of views annually.

By never betting on a single cutover. The legacy and target systems run in parallel, synchronized through Change Data Capture, and automated scripts reconcile the outputs of both systems row by row at every processing cycle. A client segment moves permanently only once the new platform matches the legacy output, and until that point the legacy system remains the source of truth, so the migration stays reversible. Any issue is contained to the segment in flight rather than the whole estate. This discipline is how DNA Solutions has migrated billing and transaction pipelines that could not afford a minute of downtime, and it applies to every program regardless of size.

Start with the audit, and resist the urge to pick a target architecture first. Most aging estates have two or three workloads that concentrate the bulk of the licensing cost, the operational risk, or both, and those are rarely the ones people assume. The audit identifies them, quantifies what standing still costs, and ranks the candidates by effort against impact. From there the first move is usually a low-risk, high-learning migration that proves the approach on real data before anything critical is touched. If the audit concludes that the right answer is to upgrade in place rather than migrate, that is what the roadmap will say.

No. The phases are designed to be valuable on their own. The audit is a standalone deliverable that improves your position whether or not you continue: a documented map of your estate, its risks and its costs. The roadmap is written to be executable by any competent team, including yours. And execution itself is staged, so you can pause after any segment with production intact and the value of the completed stages already banked. Most clients do continue through the full program, but that should be because each phase earned the next one, never because an early commitment made stopping impossible.