In a world where software ships in seconds, teams are still chained to legacy systems built for a different era. What once passed as “good enough” for storing and distributing builds has become a drain on productivity - adding risk, slowing delivery, and quietly inflating costs year after year.
In this post, we’ll break down the hidden cost of legacy artifact repositories, discuss the importance of modernizing through cloud-native artifact management, and demonstrate how you can leave the old infrastructure that has been slowing your software supply chain.
Legacy artifact management involves older on-premise artifact repositories or in-house custom systems. These tools were designed in another era, when teams used monolithic applications and updates were done once a year or even less.
The modern reality is very different. Cloud-native development, continuous CI/CD pipelines, and distributed engineering teams need a modern artifact management approach that delivers scalability, uptime, and built-in security.
This is where legacy artifact repositories fall behind. Many teams assume that on-prem systems are “more secure” because they’re isolated, but isolation no longer protects against today’s threats. Most attacks now originate upstream, through open-source dependencies that already contain vulnerabilities, malicious code injections, or compromised packages.
With the volume and speed of issues emerging in the open-source ecosystem, an isolated, self-hosted repository cannot keep pace without continuous scanning, real-time visibility, and automated updates. Without these protections, legacy artifact management becomes a blind spot in the software supply chain - quietly storing and distributing unverified or unsafe artifacts.
Legacy systems can feel safer to stick with - they’re already in place and “working.” But maintaining the status quo often hides bigger costs: outdated infrastructure, ongoing maintenance, and mounting security risks from unpatched or unsupported components.
Legacy repositories need to be manually patched, updated, backed up, and scaled. Teams spend valuable engineering time on server management instead of innovation. Each new project or environment increases the complexity of configuration and slows down the development.
Hosting artifact repositories either in on-prem or in self-managed cloud VMs requires continued expenditure on storage, bandwidth, and compute. The costs increase unintentionally as the size and volume of artifacts grows (especially large Docker images or build artifacts). Beyond infrastructure, many older systems also require costly vendor support contracts for upgrades, patches, and troubleshooting. These fees often increase over time and are non-negotiable.
Legacy systems often lack built-in scanning, access control, or software bill of materials (SBOM) capabilities. Lacking transparency in dependencies leaves teams exposed to vulnerabilities and unmet compliance requirements - something that enterprises will not be able to afford in 2025 and beyond's regulatory environment.
As repositories grow, performance bottlenecks emerge - developers face slower downloads, failed builds, and pipeline downtime, all of which directly slow release velocity and drain productivity.
Legacy tools may have provided the groundwork for early DevOps, but they cannot keep up with the current software landscape. Modern organizations need next-generation artifact management - cloud-native solutions designed for speed, security, scalability, and seamless integration with cloud-native CI/CD pipelines.
A cloud-native artifact management platform is more than just a storage location for packages - it’s a critical pillar of your software supply chain security. It guarantees that every artifact, from source to deployment, is verified, traceable, and instantly accessible, regardless of where your teams are working.
These capabilities are exactly why more organizations are moving to modern, cloud-native platforms that combine speed, security, and scalability to support today’s software delivery demands - reasons we explore in detail below.
With legacy artifact repositories, engineering teams spend hours managing servers, applying patches, and juggling storage. A truly cloud-native artifact management platform is different from simply hosting a repository in the cloud—it’s built to auto-scale, self-update, and deliver continuous security without manual intervention. There’s no server downtime, no upgrade windows to schedule, and no need to plan for storage expansion - everything is handled seamlessly in the background.
Self-hosted systems cannot keep pace with the growth in artifact volume size. A cloud-native artifact management platform dynamically boosts its capacity to manage millions of artifacts across multiple teams, regions, and projects, without compromising performance.
Using elastic storage and edge caching CDNs, developers are always guaranteed a quick download and high uptime.
In today’s world, threats move faster than ever. With malicious packages and supply chain attacks on the rise, cloud-native artifact repositories integrate vulnerability scanning, access controls, and SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) directly into your pipelines.
This ensures that all artifacts maintained and shared are validated, trackable, and consistent with the industry regulations such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, and FedRAMP.
No extra patching or standalone security tools - modern artifact management integrates security into every phase of your software supply chain.
A truly cloud-native artifact repository ensures artifacts are forwarded to the closest edge location, which significantly decreases both the time spent building and deploying, which has a direct impact on increasing developer productivity and CI/CD throughput.
Engineers can focus on building features rather than waiting on downloads or troubleshooting failed builds, making software delivery faster, more reliable, and predictable.
Legacy repositories often require plugins or manual scripting to integrate with CI/CD tools. Cloud-native artifact management platforms offer native integrations with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, and more - all via robust APIs.
This ensures that artifacts flow seamlessly through your CI/CD pipelines, maintaining consistency, traceability, and reliability from development all the way to production.
In large organizations, artifacts are often scattered across multiple repositories and sometimes duplicated, making governance and visibility a constant challenge. A cloud-native artifact management system provides a centralized, single platform for managing visibility, audit, and access.
Administrators can also manage published, promoted, or consumed artifacts - to ensure compliance and reduce the risk of unauthorized access or obsolete dependencies.
In contrast to self-managed solutions that have unpredictable infrastructure charges, cloud-native artifact management follows a usage-based pricing scheme, which is predictable.
You pay for what you use. You do not expect to incur costs for hardware, maintenance, or downtime. This will ultimately lead to a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and a better understanding of the ROI of engineering time.
Moving legacy artifact management to a new, modern, cloud-native repository is not just a technical choice but a strategic one that enhances both the security, performance, and user experience of developing a product or service, as well as reduces costs in the long run.
Migrating from legacy artifact management to a modern, cloud-native repository improves security, performance, and the overall developer experience while helping reduce long-term operational costs. By centralizing control, simplifying scalability, and strengthening the software supply chain, teams can focus on building software more efficiently and securely.
The idea of moving away from on-premise or legacy artifact systems to a modern, cloud-native solution can be overwhelming, but with the correct plan, it is achievable.
🔥Top tip: Cloudsmith’s Migration Toolkit, combined with expert support, makes the transition seamless - preserving your history and metadata while enabling improved security and scalable infrastructure.
Teams that modernize and migrate to cloud-native artifact management see measurable returns:
Time spent maintaining a legacy repository directly impacts productivity and costs. Migrating to a modern, cloud-native artifact repository preserves operational efficiency and supports long-term software delivery improvements.
All of these challenges, including scalability, security, automation, and visibility, can be solved with a truly cloud-native approach to artifact management. And if you are planning a migration to the cloud, it is worth doing it right rather than sticking with your existing provider simply because it feels easier. A migration is already a major change, and it is the perfect opportunity to elevate your entire artifact management program.
Cloudsmith was built from the ground up as a fully cloud-native platform that helps teams break free from the limits of traditional repositories, delivering seamless automation, built-in security, and scalable reliability in a single unified system.
Here’s how Cloudsmith enables that transition seamlessly:
A modern, cloud-native artifact repository like Cloudsmith simplifies operations, strengthens security, and accelerates software delivery - without the hidden costs or complexity of legacy systems.
Legacy artifact management is not only dated - it’s also costly, risky, and non-sustainable. The emerging generation of cloud-native artifact management platforms, such as Cloudsmith, transcends complexity with confidence, enabling teams to achieve the visibility and velocity required to build securely at scale.
The faster you retire legacy systems, the sooner your organization can build securely, on a truly modern, cloud-native platform.
The management of legacy artifacts encompasses older systems (typically on-premise artifact management) used to store and distribute software packages. Such systems do not offer the automation, scalability, and integrated security that are needed in modern DevOps, resulting in inefficiencies and increased operational costs.
Beyond licensing, teams also bear the costs of infrastructure maintenance, downtime, manual updates, and security risks. These hidden expenses can quickly add up, often exceeding the investment required for a modern, cloud-native alternative.
Begin by auditing your existing repositories, determining dependencies, and automating the migration with the help of migration tools (such as Cloudsmith’s Migration Tool). The advantage is to retain the integrity of artifacts with the purpose of avoiding manual management.
Uptime, scaling, and security are automatically managed on cloud-native platforms. They are CI/CD integrated, can distribute faster worldwide, and can eliminate maintenance overhead, allowing your developers to focus on their core tasks
Modern artifact systems integrate vulnerability scanning, SBOMs generation, and access control. This will ensure artifacts are secure, traceable, and compliant – which is essential to securing your software supply chain.
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