Likely Normal

The dreams of a sleek, all-cloud future crash headfirst into the “Oh crap, this 20-year-old system still runs payroll” reality in IT modernization. It’s like trying to renovate a haunted house while the ghosts (read: legacy servers) keep screaming “I’m still relevant!” from the basement. Sure, the plan was a clean, cloud-only utopia, but here we are, stuck in a Frankenstein’s monster of half-migrated apps, duct-taped integrations, and that one ancient database that technically runs on a single, wheezing server… in accounting.

The sunsetting process? More like watching the sun get stuck in an endless loop of ‘just five more minutes.’ You can’t kill these systems—they’re like cockroaches with pensions, clinging to life through sheer bureaucratic willpower. “But it’s integrated!” wails the CFO, as if that excuses the fact that your “hybrid environment” is now just a fancy term for “we pay for AWS AND a server room that smells like regret.”

And so, the charade begins: pretending the legacy tech is mostly dead just like in The Princess Bride, while it quietly siphons budget, complicates workflows, and occasionally erupts into flames at 3 AM. The cloud may be the future, but the past? Oh, it’s still here, humming along in the background, eating licenses like candy and laughing at your “digital transformation” PowerPoint. Moral of the story? The only thing harder than building a new system is murdering the old one.