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].
“Application Decommissioning is a strategic approach for systematically retiring one or more applications outdated and costly legacy applications without compromising business needs, compliance requirements, data accessibility to maintain business continuity.”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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
in a De-Commission project, Brickendon can help with step-by-step approach (but not limited to) as follows:
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Bibliography
[1] 5 considerations when decommissioning legacy applications – OpenText Blogs
[2] Cost Savings Opportunities from Decommissioning Inactive Applications (solix.com)