When a homeowner gets ready   are moving to new “houses”- rapid application locations   that enable cloud, mobile and social features and allow  boxes and forgotten equipment into a shiny new home.   The sun setting of an organization's legacy applications   is much like cleaning out the IT garage. Organizations   for analytic capabilities to make fast decisions. Putting   messy, old applications from their previous home into the   new, serves only to encumber how quickly businesses   can do the new things.

“ CIOs today are  focused on the  core objectives  of reducing cost,  increasing efficiency  and managing risk”

 Organizations today are spending millions of   dollars and countless hours maintaining these legacy   applications. Governing bodies require the data to stay   intact and accessible for a period of time and IT often   struggles with removing a “piece of the puzzle”. As   companies seek to reverse this paradigm, they battle   with how to cost-effectively manage their old applications   and drive innovation to maintain a competitive edge in   the market.  

 Fortunately, there is a fast and cost effective way   to clean out the IT garage today. By consolidating   important legacy records into a regulated and compliant   repository, data is easily searchable and retrievable.  Large enterprises can both reduce the cost of maintaining   applications that house static information and simplify   compliance, all while decommissioning older, unneeded   systems.  to move from one house to   another, often one of the most   daunting tasks is cleaning out   their garage. No one wants to   move the entire collection of old   Recently, a North American financial institution was   experiencing rapid expansion of their business due   to recent M&A activity. One of the by-products of this   growth was that the bank was left to maintain over a   100 legacy IT applications, creating a drain on internal   resources. After evaluating its needs for data retention,   integrity, compliance and security, the organization   implemented an easily accessible, unified data store   designed specifically for long-term application data   preservation. As a result of the implementation, the   company was able to realize a $5 million dollar annual   cost savings, and almost $300K a month in fees that   merely kept legacy applications in read-only mode.This   cost savings provided significant financial value to allow   them to invest millions of dollars in innovative IT projects.

 The bank’s scenario is not unique. Many organizations   are experiencing exploding growth in
 business information, as well as an   increase in regulatory requirements.   This mix of opportunity and risk   is hitting IT departments at a time  when serious cost cutting is required.   Legacy and enterprise applications   are bursting with different forms   of information: transactions,   documents, voice recordings, xml   data, print streams and other types   of structured and unstructured  data. This accumulation stretches  an organization’s capacity to the   breaking point. 

 With these obstacles in place, how  does an organization transform  itself? How does it turn its focus from   managing the old to innovating the  new? Application retirement.

 In order to realize the full value  of application retirement, companies  need a solution robust enough   to manage extensive retention   policies, handle complex security   requirements and continue to  provide nimble access to retired  data/content.

  The ideal solution to address   all these challenges must have the  capacity to:
 • Ingest and retain all information  types, structured or unstructured, in  a consolidated repository
 • Provide the ability to audit and  preserve data and content to meet a  variety of regulatory and governance  mandates
 • Easily manage simple to complex   retention policies via an intuitive user   interface for centralized retention  policy management   
 • Store information in an open,  industry-standard format for long   term retention and easy access.
 • Have no dependencies on the    originating application for managing  or referencing the information

   Such a solution is purpose   built for retiring applications.  Banks, hospitals, pharmaceutical  companies, any organization that is   required to keep information around   for regulatory and compliance  reasons, can turn off the applications   while keeping and making the  data accessible, searchable and   Retrievable. They can also use big  data analytics to put reasoning over  it and tie it to new applications.

 CIOs today are focused on   the core objectives of reducing   cost, increasing efficiency and   managing risk. But ask a majority  of CIOs what their strategy is for   data deletion and most will likely   not have an answer. No such plans  exist. It’s understandable, because   any change to the IT environment   can expose a company to risk, and   the prospect of undertaking a large scale project can seem perilous. And     so the IT garage keeps getting fuller.

 However, companies can now   save the data while shedding the  expense of managing excessive  applications.  The path to this transformation of  IT expense is in place, and the  following are the steps to be taken  to build an application retirement  strategy:  

 • Pick a few  after determining which  applications are low-risk, select 3 to  5 for decommissioning   Jason Capitel 
 • Take an inventory of your applications  organizations must understand how   and if the breadth of their existing   applications interact with each other
 • Start small, think big, scale fast after  realizing that the world doesn’t fall   apart during the initial process, use   the gained confidence to build the   capability to clean out the garage
 • Develop a systematic approach  continue to target applications while   moving up stack by analyzing whether   there is a good business answer for   maintaining each application
 • Repurpose assets - from legacy  applications to new innovation 

 To gain an advantage in today’s  competitive economic landscape,  organizations need to leverage    third party technology experts and    invest in solutions that can help   them achieve maximum technical  and financial value. By developing   a strategic application retirement   strategy, businesses can ensure that   legacy technology doesn’t sit stagnant   and can, in fact, co-exist within new   application eco-systems.