Service · Migration

Off legacy, one slice at a time.

We move you off end-of-life systems incrementally — behavior preserved, the system live throughout, a tested way back at every step. No big-bang rewrite.

Stays live while it moves Reversible by default Behavior preserved

Incremental cutover

ROUTING LAYER
LEGACYNEW STACK
Auth Auth ✓
Billing Billing ✓
Catalog Catalog…
Reports queued

Live throughout · rollback on every slice

The real problem

Why staying on a legacy system is the expensive option.

The cost is invisible until it isn't. An end-of-life platform doesn't bill you for a rewrite — it bills you in security patches that stop shipping, budget eaten keeping the old thing alive, and a shrinking pool of people who can work on it.

Then a dependency hits end of support, an auditor flags the unsupported stack, or your one expert leaves — and the migration you deferred becomes the emergency you can't schedule. Most of the money goes to standing still; a migration done right is how that diverted budget comes back.

~80%

Of the >$100B annual federal IT budget goes to operating existing IT — including legacy systems 8 to 51 years old with known vulnerabilities.

GAO, May 2023 ↗

20–40%

Of the tech estate's value is technical debt — with 10–20% of the new-product budget diverted to servicing it instead of building.

McKinsey, 2020 ↗

What gets migrated

What gets migrated off legacy — and what each move buys you.

"Legacy migration" isn't one motion — it's a set of specific moves off specific dead ends.

01

Language & framework version migration

Moves code off an end-of-life language or framework version — PHP, .NET Framework, Java, AngularJS — onto a supported one, behavior preserved.

Patches return, hiring gets easier, the platform takes features again

02

Deprecated-platform replacement

Moves a workload off a sunset platform — an unsupported OS, a discontinued app server — onto a current one, old and new running side by side.

Exit compliance and outage risk — no high-stakes single cutover

03

Database & data-store migration

Moves data off an end-of-life or costly database engine to a supported one, with schema mapping, record-for-record reconciliation, and a rehearsed switchover.

The data moves without loss and without going offline

04

Incremental cutover (strangler-fig)

Stands up the new system behind a routing layer that shifts live traffic old to new, reversibly, instead of one all-or-nothing switch.

Every step small, verified, and reversible — risk bounded to one slice

05

Behavior preservation & regression guarding

Captures what the legacy system actually does — including the undocumented quirks the business depends on — into automated tests that guard every cutover.

The new system does what the old one did, edge cases included

06

Re-platforming off costly infrastructure

Moves a system off end-of-life hardware or costly licensing onto a modern footprint — often, but not always, the cloud.

The recurring cost and the looming hardware deadline both go away

Big-bang rewrite Succeeds

Large rewrites succeed under 10% of the time — small ones, about 90%. So we migrate in small, reversible slices, not one launch that has to land. (Standish Group, CHAOS 2020.)

What's included

What our legacy migration services cover.

The move off legacy specifically — for the broader program see application modernization; when the destination is the cloud, see cloud migration services.

01

Assessment & dependency mapping

We inventory the estate, map dependencies, and surface undocumented behavior and what to retire — ending in a costed, slice-by-slice plan before any code is touched.

02

Incremental migration architecture

We design the strangler-fig path — the routing layer, the seams, the order of slices — so the migration is a sequence of small, reversible steps, not one switch.

03

Language, framework & platform migration

We execute the per-slice move — off an unsupported language, framework version, or deprecated platform — preserving behavior, each slice verified against legacy before the next begins.

04

Data migration & rehearsed cutover

We map the schema, replicate and reconcile the data record-for-record, and run a dress-rehearsed cutover with a tested rollback — so the data move is a non-event, not an outage.

05

Behavior preservation & regression testing

We capture the legacy system's real behavior — quirks included — into an automated test suite that guards every cutover, so undocumented edge cases don't get lost.

06

Security hardening, cutover & handover

Every migration runs under an NDA and security review; for regulated estates, controls and audit trails move with the workload. After cutover we harden, document, and train your team.

What you get — all assigned to you under full work-for-hire IP

The migrated system running in your own environment
The assessment and slice-by-slice migration plan
The regression and behavior-parity test suite
The cutover and rollback runbooks
The retired legacy footprint, documented
A trained team to own and extend it

How it runs

How a legacy migration engagement runs.

The same delivery model behind all our modernization work, tuned for migrations — one accountable lead, payment tied to the outcome, no handoffs.

STEP 01

Assess

Inventory the estate, map dependencies, surface undocumented behavior, and decide what migrates versus what retires.

Output: a slice-by-slice plan, a costed case & metrics

STEP 02

Plan the slices

Design the strangler-fig routing and the order of cutovers, smallest-risk first, with a rollback path defined for each slice.

Output: a sequenced cutover plan, rollback per slice

STEP 03

Build & shadow

Build each slice on the modern stack and run it in shadow against the legacy system, comparing behavior before any traffic moves.

Output: a verified slice & a passing behavior-parity set

STEP 04

Cut over a slice

Shift live traffic to the new slice in a planned window, rollback ready — the legacy equivalent goes dark, scheduled for retirement.

Output: a slice in production, legacy equivalent retiring

STEP 05

Repeat & hand over

Migrate the next slice, then retire the legacy footprint and train your team to own the fully migrated system.

Output: a fully migrated system you own, old stack gone

Straight talk

A migration we've been running, live, for over a decade.

The hardest part of legacy migration isn't the first move off an old platform — it's doing it again and again, as each new stack ages in turn, without ever taking the live system down. That repeated, downtime-free discipline is the one we've held longest.

We've run Bridge Athletic since its 2012 startup build, carrying that product through 12+ years of migration, re-platforming, and re-engineering — moving off each aging stack as it reached its limits, paying down technical debt every pass, while the product never went offline. It's now used by USC, the LA Rams, and MLB and MLS teams.

We'll tell you plainly when a system should be retired or left alone rather than migrated — which a vendor billing by the rewrite won't.

Silicon Prime is a Stanford-rooted Responsible AI lab, founded 2011, run by founder Kelvin Tran — 20+ years of production engineering, who has delivered multimillion-dollar systems for one of the world's largest automobile manufacturers and is personally accountable for every engagement.

Why migrate off legacy with us.

01

We've done the decade-long version. A product carried through 12+ years of legacy migration without ever going offline (Bridge Athletic) is a different proof than a one-time lift — and it's the standard we bring to your cutover.

02

Incremental and reversible by default. We migrate in small slices behind a routing layer, a tested rollback on each, because the data on big-bang rewrites is unforgiving. Reversibility isn't a premium tier; it's how we work.

03

Behavior preserved, not approximated. The migration is guarded by tests built from your system's real behavior — including the quirks the business depends on — so the new stack does what the old one did.

04

Destination-agnostic. We migrate to whatever fits — a modern on-prem footprint or the cloud — chosen on your constraints, not a partnership.

05

Built to transfer. The migrated system, the test suite, the cutover runbooks, and the documented retirement of the old stack are assigned to you, and your team is trained to run it when we step back.

Where it lands first

Where getting off legacy matters most.

Questions buyers ask before they migrate.

How do you migrate without taking the system offline? +
We migrate in slices behind a routing layer — the strangler-fig pattern — instead of a single switch. Each slice is built on the modern stack, run in shadow against the legacy system to confirm it behaves identically, then cut over in a planned window with a tested rollback ready. If a re-routed slice looks wrong, traffic flips back in seconds and the migration continues. We've applied this discipline modernizing Bridge Athletic's platform across a relationship running since 2012; planned, reversible cutovers are the default, not the premium tier.
Do you ever recommend a big-bang rewrite? +
Rarely, and only when an incremental path genuinely isn't possible. The evidence is against it: the Standish Group's CHAOS research found large projects succeed less than 10% of the time versus ~90% for small ones. A big-bang rewrite concentrates all the risk into one launch that rarely lands; an incremental migration spends that risk down a slice at a time. We'll tell you honestly if a clean-slate rebuild is the right call — but it's the exception, not our default.
How do you make sure the new system behaves like the old one? +
We pin the legacy behavior into tests before we move it — including the undocumented quirks the business has come to depend on, the billing rule that only ever lived in old code, the edge case nobody wrote down. We capture them as automated regression tests, run the new slice in shadow against the legacy system to compare outputs, and only cut over once the behavior matches. The migration is invisible to your users and your data, not a behavior change in disguise.
How is this different from cloud migration or modernization? +
Legacy migration is the move off end-of-life systems and platforms specifically — old language and framework versions, deprecated platforms, databases nearing end of support. When the destination is specifically the cloud, that's cloud migration services; when the work is the broader re-engineering program around a system, that's application modernization. The three overlap, and one engagement often touches all three — we scope which one you actually need rather than selling the biggest.
How do you handle data migration and the risk of data loss? +
We map the schema, replicate the data, and reconcile it record-for-record against the source before anything cuts over. The switchover is rehearsed in a planned window with a tested rollback path in place, so if reconciliation surfaces a mismatch we revert without loss. For fintech and healthcare estates, audit trails and compliance controls are part of the cutover plan — they move with the data, not after it.
How do we choose the right legacy migration partner? +
Look for accountability, an incremental track record, and domain fit — not the lowest bid. McKinsey's landmark 2012 study of large IT projects found they run 45% over budget while delivering 56% less value than predicted, so a partner who de-risks the work into small, reversible slices matters more than raw headcount. Ask who is personally accountable — we assign one lead with no handoffs — for proof of a system kept live throughout a migration, and whether they'll work inside your own cloud tenant under your existing SOC 2, HIPAA, or PCI controls rather than lifting your data into theirs.
What does it cost and how long does it take? +
Each slice reaches production on its own, and most engagements reach steady state in 4–8 weeks per tranche, under a fixed-scope engagement with one accountable lead and payment tied to the outcome. Total cost depends on the size of the estate and how many slices need real re-engineering versus a straightforward version migration — our development cost guide gives real ranges, and the assessment turns it into a fixed number before the migration starts. No open-ended "rewrite the whole thing" line item.
Who owns the migrated system when you're done? +
You do. IP ownership is defined in each engagement's contract, and our default is a full transfer to you — the migrated system, the behavior-parity test suite, the cutover and rollback runbooks, and the documentation of the retired legacy stack all move to you, with your team trained to operate and extend it. Keep us on a reduced retainer or take the keys; the engagement is built around the handover.

Thirty minutes · no pitch deck

Ready to get off the legacy stack without freezing the roadmap?

Bring the system you're stuck on — an end-of-life platform, an unsupported framework, a database past its support date — and we'll map the dependencies, name the trade-offs, and lay out a costed, incremental path off it that keeps the business running the whole way.