Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

The Massive Challenge of Connecting Old Systems to the Cloud

19 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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In this brief dialogue, the speakers highlight the fundamental difficulty of integrating legacy infrastructure into modern cloud environments. They note that many of these systems were originally built without any intention of internet connectivity, often running outdated operating systems and serving non‑revenue, maintenance‑only roles. Despite their age and lack of business justification for upgrades, these systems now must be linked to the cloud—either all at once or through a slow, incremental process—creating a massive technical and operational problem due to scale, risk, and the need to keep critical services running.

He says the main problem is a lot of these systems were never meant to be connected to the internet. Now we are connecting them to the cloud. That is massive. Some of these systems are running old OSes, big problems.
A lot of them are. A lot of them are huge. And those— there's systems that are out there in infrastructure that don't make money. Think about those. Those don't need the newest anything. They were— they've been running and they've just been keeping them running. And now they need all those connected too, or they've been connecting them slowly, and that's massive, massive problem.