It's Time to Say Goodbye to Your Old Apps

Companies today are increasingly facing the problem of rapidly evolving work environments. Most businesses today have come to depend on applications such as customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, automatic data processing, etc, which are central to their core business functions. Over a period of time, some applications may not be able to serve current business needs and hence become redundant.

As such legacy applications accumulate within an organization, they use up the company's resources but provide little value to the organization in return. Yet, the data that is held within these applications can still be useful and important to retain. Typically, this situation forces companies to hang on to their legacy applications. However the wiser solution is for companies to retire these applications and leverage alternative technology options to retain the data within.

One of the biggest advantages of retiring redundant applications is the high saving on costs. Recent Forrester studies conducted among global enterprises found that the average percent of the budget that ongoing operations and maintenance consumes at 65% - with some firms admitting that their lights-on costs are much higher - into the ninetieth percentile or more. Out of this, about 50 % is spent on sustaining redundant legacy applications.

Sustaining applications typically requires the use of a company's limited infrastructure and money to support its functioning hardware and software. In addition to this there is maintenance, licensing, and administration costs associated with supporting an application environment. Consequently, according to Gartner, by 2020, half of all applications that are running in data centers as of 2010 will be retired. If true, that represents magnificent savings.

Application Retirement

While the costs saved by application retirement is quite obvious, the dilemma that companies today are faced with is how to retire their redundant applications while still maintaining the accessibility of the data within it.

The first step towards a successful application retirement process is the archival process. This involves the extraction of the complete business entities, not just the transactional data but also the master and reference data and metadata. Once this is complete, the data should be garnered with the ability to be extracted and moved - including documents, attachments, images, and audio files associated to application and database records. The next step here is to store this file in an optimal format such that it is highly compressed and secure and immutable file for later retrieval. Once this is done, you can validate that all of the data has been completely and correctly archived.

A company that carries out this archiving can make a significant cost saving at this point itself. The next steps represent savings over a long period of time. Typically, the process of application retirement is especially useful in the case of regulatory compliance. Compliance often demands of organizations to store data over long periods of time and also to be able to access that data on a regular basis. However most of this data is not of any other immediate use to the organization, but it is hard to tell when regulatory authorities would require that data. So the next step in application retirement is to be able to assign retention policies to different classes of archived data, apply legal holds to certain data, etc, so that you can retrieve it easily when required.

Some archiving solutions also enforce retention and disposal policies so that you can associate retention policies based on regulations and safely purge the data in a legally defensible manner, once the retention period expires. Think about the hidden costs here too, because failing to produce data required for a legal case in a timely manner can cost you even more than the cost of maintaining it. Not to mention the possible incriminating evidence that you never thought about. The timely purging of data is a good data management practice.

After this, the final step of the entire process is to provide easy search access to the data from any BI/reporting tools which help maintain access to archived data in database instances from existing application interfaces. This saves the company a lot of time and money in retrieving the files.

Application retirement can also be used for consolidating applications. For example, at the time of mergers and acquisitions or in some regional offices that run different applications for financials, procurement, projects, and other line-of-business functions there is a requirement for the consolidation of applications as this simplifies the user experience and save costs. In this scenario as well the process of application retirement can make the consolidation of applications a possibility without having to lose any of the data present within it.

The Adavantages

The biggest advantage of application retirement is that it translates to a direct cost saving, ie, companies can save money on the process almost as and when it happens. So, the next time your organization wants to reduce their IT budget, the first place for them to turn to should be application retirement. The results seen in terms of cost savings are significant and companies can use it to their advantage almost immediately.

A smooth application retirement solution helps organizations make the maximum use of the data stored in their legacy applications by saving business, labor, software and hardware costs. This consequently helps organizations maximize their return on data by increasing the value of their data and reducing the cost required to keep it alive. Application retirement makes the data stored in it timely, actionable, relevant, and accessible and thus gives organizations a clear advantage over their competitors. And most importantly, the process ensures that retiring your applications does not have to mean getting rid of your data - just archiving it to make it more organized and accessible.