Buy, Build, or Migrate?
When your current systems are no longer keeping up and hard to support due to technical debt, the decision to buy off-the-shelf software, build a custom solution, or migrate your existing platform is not a simple one. Each path comes with trade-offs in cost, time, control, and long-term flexibility. At Core, we have guided dozens of organizations through this decision-making process often as part of a larger modernization strategy.
Exploring the Options
Buying commercial software may seem like the fastest route, but many businesses discover too late that packaged solutions don’t always fit well with how they operate. Building from scratch offers full control and customization, but the cost and effort involved can be significant. Migration sits in the middle preserving your business logic and data while giving you the benefits of a modern technology stack.


Key Considerations
This section explores all three options in detail. We break down the key considerations: how much of your current legacy system support the business, whether you need to preserve legacy data, and how fast your team needs to go live. Whether you are coming from a 30-year-old COBOL application or a PowerHouse 4GL application running on an outdated and unsupported hardware platform, we can help you weigh the options realistically.
The decision you make today will shape your IT landscape for the next decade. We bring decades of experience in legacy modernization, custom development, and technology evaluation to help you make that choice with confidence.
For many organizations, legacy systems have been the backbone of day-to-day operations for years, sometimes even decades. But as technology continues to evolve, these older systems become harder to maintain, less flexible, and more disconnected from how the business needs to work today. At some point, leadership starts to ask: Is it time for something new? One of the common routes taken is replacing the legacy system with… Read More
Legacy systems, we all rely on them more than we probably think. Some have been running for decades, built in now-outdated programming languages, tightly woven into the daily operations of a business. And while they might have once been cutting-edge, the truth is: many are now hard to maintain, hard to scale, and even harder to evolve with modern technology. That’s where manual rewriting comes in. This approach involves rebuilding the entire application and not just… Read More
At its core, Automated Migration is about moving data, code, or entire systems from one environment to another using automation tools. These tools are often pre-configured with rules that define what to move, how to transform it if needed, and where to put it. This can involve… Read More