Today, every large organization has several legacy applications that it would like to decommission. However, even if an application is no longer in direct operational use, it can hold valuable information that organizations may need for reference and for compliance reasons. To maintain the defunct system, it would not only be an issue of unnecessary storage but also cost would be involved for maintenance, security & compliance [1].
Business Objectives Driving Application De-Commissioning Include:
- Data center consolidation & Maintenance: to achieve cost savings, increase security and enhance control.
- Mergers and acquisitions: to consolidate the applications estate across an entire organization.
- Transition to cloud: Forrester predicts that more than 50% of global enterprises will rely on at least one cloud platform to drive digital transformation.
- Supporting a distributed and remote workforce: especially in the post-coronavirus world, efficient remote access is in explosive demand.
- Access to expertise: it is increasingly difficult to find expertise in legacy software, it is not a career priority for new technical talent. [1]
“Application Decommissioning is a strategic approach for systematically retiring one or more applications outdated and costly legacy applications without compromising business needs, compliance requirements, data accessibility to maintain business continuity.” [1]
Risks of Decommissioning Legacy Applications:
Decommissioning legacy applications carries significant risks if proper method is not followed. Legacy applications hold huge volumes of business functionality and data, their replacement is costly and can be a risky endeavor.
With the emergence of a new generation of tools, risk has been significantly reduced, but cost, complexity and duration of migration projects remain a significant concern among IT leaders and project champions. For organizations that are going through a digital transformation, data experts are essential in understanding and managing the decommissioning process. [1]
What is meant by Archival or Decommission of database?
Database archiving is the process of removing selected records (from active databases) and storing them in an archive where they can be managed and retrieved if needed. Database archiving allows the movement of little-used data to a standardized archive, while keeping it available if needed. This practice also has the additional benefit of potentially increasing database performance due to the smaller active data store.
Database retirement is the process of decommissioning (shutting down) an inactive database application – for cost savings. In the past, companies simply kept the obsolete database application running just in case they needed to access the legacy data.
In any successful migration project, the below five important areas must be considered:
Reliable and Reasonable Cost and Duration Estimates
Application migration projects can be compared with an iceberg: there is a visible part that is easy to control – this is an area where requirements can be defined, and solution compliance can be validated—and there is also a significant “invisible” part where requirements are not known. The “invisible” complexity of legacy systems in combination with competitive pressure often results in low initial estimations of effort that may put an entire project at risk.
Proof of Archiving Completeness
Upon completion of a data archive, an audit and chain of custody reports are required. These validate the data consistency between source and target systems. In addition, proof must be provided that the complete data set marked for archiving was indeed archived and is available in the archiving software.
Quality of the resulting application and effort required to extend it
Three main areas need to be considered, the look and feel of the data presentation, the speed of the searches and data exports, and the amount of effort to add new searches.
Ability to respond to new and overlooked requirements in the future
It is important to be able to demonstrate the ability to implement any future ad-hoc queries and execute heavy queries in the background without significantly impacting the performance of other searches.
Compliance
Managing the retention of the archived records is important, especially through any changes in corporate compliance requirements and retention policies. It must also be accessible for auditing purposes. [1]
Three Key Benefits of Decommissioning Your Data Centre:
- While considering data security, de-commissioning application can cut loose ends.
- De-commissioning can help you save on operations cost. A study done by the Compliance, Governance, and Oversight Council (CGOC) showed that the average annual cost savings for decommissioning inactive applications was $40,000 and can exceed $120,000 for larger applications [2].
- De-commissioning can increase regulatory compliance.
How Brickendon can help?
in a De-Commission project, Brickendon can help with step-by-step approach (but not limited to) as follows:
- Make sure that the application to be retired is not in use by checking the access logs.
- Identify the Users who have used the application.
- Conducting Interviews/Discussions/ Send Questionnaire’s to users and understand the dependencies.
- Post getting inputs make analysis and document the compliance, technical dependency, and other criticalities of the application.
- According to the Analysis recommend a decision for De-commission application.
- Post analysis store the archived data on client servers (preferably on a cloud server/a standalone server) supported with a proper documentation for future reference as per business and local regulatory requirements.
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