The Executive Summary

The most dangerous phrase in software engineering is “Let’s rewrite it from scratch.”

For established organizations—whether a high-traffic media platform like abcMallorca or a government entity like IESS—the legacy systems (often .NET or Oracle) are the revenue engines. You cannot simply turn them off.

At OpenMind, we specialize in “Non-Destructive Modernization.” We treat the legacy stack not as a problem to be deleted, but as a stable “Core API” that we wrap in modern infrastructure. Here is how we modernized two massive datasets without a single minute of downtime.

1. The Challenge: “The Legacy Trap”

• The Frontend: Needed to be lightning-fast (Core Web Vitals) to maintain SEO dominance, which the legacy .NET templates couldn’t achieve.
• The Complexity: Hundreds of “aggregated listings” (real estate, restaurants, hotels) needed to be ingested automatically and rendered as static, high-speed pages.

2. The Solution: The “Strangler” Middleware

Instead of migrating the database (high risk), we built a Middleware Layer on AWS.

A. The AWS Aggregation Pipeline

We engineered a serverless ingestion pipeline using AWS Lambda.

• Ingest: The system pulls raw data from the .NET core (listings, availability, client status).
• Normalize: It cleanses the data (standardizing image formats, validating text).
• Distribute: It pushes the “Clean Data” to a Headless CMS (WordPress) and triggers a Next.js build.
• Result: The legacy .NET system remains the “Source of Truth” for business logic, but the user never touches it.

3. The “Government Scale” Proof: IESS Guayas

We applied this same logic to the public sector with the IESS (Instituto Ecuatoriano de Seguridad Social).

• The Silos: Health, Pension, and Admin data lived in disconnected SQL/Oracle databases.
• The Overlay: We built a “Read-Only” Middleware that queries these distinct legacy silos to create a Single Citizen View dashboard.
• Security: By using middleware, we implemented modern RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) without altering the fragile legacy code beneath.

4. Technical Impact

• SEO Dominance: The static frontend scores 90+ on PageSpeed, ensuring the aggregated listings rank at the top of Google.
• Zero Downtime Deployment: We can deploy new features to the frontend daily, independent of the backend release cycles.

Why OpenMind?

We respect the code that pays the bills. Our architecture allows mature businesses to innovate on the frontend today, while safely maintaining the backend systems that have worked for a decade.