WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? EXECUTE YOUR APPLICATION DECOMMISSIONING STRATEGY TODAY

EXECUTIVE SUMMARYAs data volumes continue to grow at dizzying rates, organizations are under more pressure than ever to make smart decisions on which data to save and how to archive it for a variety of compliance, governance and operational needs. But do their originating applications all have to be saved, as well?

Even if specific data are essential to an organization, that doesn’t mean all applications need to be retained. After all, the cost, time and manpower required to maintain aging—even archaic—applications can be substantial. Simply retaining every application in an organization’s portfolio because it has authored essential data no longer makes sense. In fact, it is a looming problem that must be addressed.

Whether it is caused by technology platform changes, compliance requirements or business events like mergers and acquisitions, decommissioning applications must be part of every IT organization’s strategic plan to become more efficient, agile and aligned with the business.

This paper will describe why holding onto legacy applications is so costly and how application decommissioning can help move data to a future-proof system so your organization can recoup significant resources while meeting ongoing regulatory, audit, and other data retention requirements. It also will show how making the right choice on an archiving platform can make the job easier and lead to the greatest return on investment.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ......................................................................... 1

THE ELEPHANT IN THE IT DEPARTMENT .............................................. 3

WHERE DID THIS ELEPHANT COME FROM? .......................................... 3

CONFRONTING THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM ...................................... 4

BEST PRACTICES IN APPLICATION DECOMMISSIONING ..................... 5

APPLICATION RETIREMENT FOR EMC INFOARCHIVE ........................... 5

CONTACT US ....................................................................................... 6

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THE ELEPHANT IN THE IT DEPARTMENTIn the face of exploding data volumes, increasingly larger and complex data sets and an ever-expanding applications portfolio for most organizations, IT and business leaders should be shouting from the rooftop that holding onto every application in their portfolio is a costly and impractical way to operate.

Make no mistake about it: That elephant in the IT department—runaway costs tied to maintaining outdated, unsupported, read-only applications that are collecting dust simply to provide access to the data on them—is a growing and soon-to-be disastrous amount of debt. That financial impact is looming around the corner for many organizations, especially those operating in regulated industries that have the largest collections of legacy applications.

Your IT department likely is supporting programs that could—and should—have been decommissioned years ago, draining valuable resources that could be steered toward strategic business initiatives. In fact, it’s estimated that 50% of a typical enterprise’s applications are legacy by definition, and thus are candidates for decommissioning.1 It’s not hard to imagine the cumulative financial impact on enterprise IT budgets squandered on supporting these obsolete applications.

However, the notion of decommissioning legacy applications is not new. At a 2004 industry forum, survey results were released indicating that aging or unnecessary business applications were costing U.S. companies billions of dollars that could otherwise be put to better use without compromising organizational performance.2

But even if it was that apparent to at least some in the IT community more than a decade ago, it seems that organizations have yet to make sufficient progress in trimming their applications portfolios without compromising access to essential data.

Why?

By taking a look at the reasons organizations hold onto aging applications, we can see why it’s hard to let go.

WHERE DID THIS ELEPHANT COME FROM?While data often must be preserved, even for decades in some cases, many applications used to create, store, and manage that data are now archaic, if not fully obsolete. But where did these legacy applications come from? Typical culprits include:

• Technology platform changes: There have been several large-scale changes in the IT landscape—most notably cloud-based computing, pervasive broadband connectivity, and smartphones and tablet devices—that have dramatically changed the technology stacks used in application development. These changes mean that today’s applications frequently use a separate set of tooling from those used only a few years ago. Sunk costs for software licenses, staff training and platform tooling in many cases are not leveraged in new application development, but they remain part of the IT infrastructure to meet ongoing data availability requirements.

• Audit and regulatory requirements: In verticals such as financial services, insurance and health care, recent changes in federal law and public policy have resulted in new requirements

1 “NCC Survey of Companies With Over 50 IT Staff,” Enterprise Systems Group, January 20132 “Obsolete Software Costs U.S. Companies Billions of Dollars in Unnecessary IT Spending,” Business

Performance Management Forum, December 2004

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for data retention to satisfy audit requirements. Failure to respond to audit and discovery requests can result in severe financial penalties. So organizations end up hoarding applications to avoid penalties.

• Mergers and acquisitions: These business events often result in redundant systems that need to be maintained for some period of time. Paradoxically, attempts to improve business efficiencies through mergers can result in a reduction in business efficiency because of the need to maintain disparate technologies to satisfy a single business requirement.

CONFRONTING THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOMWhile IT leaders strive to provide continuous access to data, they don’t have to be held hostage by legacy applications on which older data resides. Luckily, application decommissioning offers a path forward for decoupling data from legacy applications in a way that provides continuous access to the information while decommissioning costly systems.

The first step to confronting the application decommissioning elephant is to determine which applications are candidates for retirement. Some well-established characteristics of applications that are prime for decommissioning include those that:

• Store data existing primarily in a read-only state, or are used for lookup and reference.

• Are maintained to satisfy numerous and complex audit and regulatory requirements but that cry out for a simplified data retention approach.

• Were acquired through business events such as mergers or acquisitions that often result in overlapping, redundant or obsolete applications.

• Store data that is well past the “expiration date” for compliance purposes (although retention thresholds can vary widely by industry and statute).

• Use obsolete systems and technology but still hold content with some level of business value for the purposes of compliance, reporting, analytics and financial operations.

• Are unsupported by the vendor and carry a growing need to reduce security risk and operational failure.

By addressing the issue of application decommissioning, IT leaders can identify how much of their IT budget is tied up in maintaining legacy systems, and, more importantly, how they can release that budget for other strategic initiatives. Application decommissioning also provides an opportunity for re-evaluating the organization’s plan for decommissioning outdated systems to ensure that it doesn’t fall into a similar trap moving forward.

Tackling application decommissioning head on also helps organizations address a problem that won’t go away by itself, but that will only get worse over time. On the positive side, decommissioning older applications can help your organization untether itself from expensive legacy systems while remaining in compliance with data retention and governance requirements. It also can result in the recovery of potentially millions of dollars that can be put back in to new initiatives.

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BEST PRACTICES IN APPLICATION DECOMMISSIONING In evaluating and eventually selecting a strategic archiving platform at the heart of an applications decommissioning strategy, it’s important to understand and to adopt a best-practices methodology that embraces both enterprise content management consulting and a technical solution for consolidating data from legacy apps into a single, cost-effective solution.

Facets of a best-practices approach include:

• Coaching on how to develop a methodology to identify high-value application targets for decommissioning.

• Categorizing applications so it can be determined which applications to decommission first and how to proceed with others (decommission, re-factor with new technologies or maintain)

• Retiring applications that are targets for decommissioning through a process that includes business and data analysis, designing and building the application decommissioning solution and deploying that solution.

Ultimately, the goal of any application decommissioning project should be simplification, especially in the way the organization manages aging data by shifting the focus from the applications to the data.

Technical considerations should include a common platform for all data, both structured and unstructured, supporting an XML-based design to ensure future proofing through a common data schema. It also needs to be policy driven for data retention in order to ensure compliance and corporate data governance.

The technical solution also must ensure the supply of legacy, archived data to analytics engines and Big Data tools like Hadoop, as well as integrated metadata to support sophisticated analytics use cases. Providing access to data from older applications so it can be part of an analytics strategy offers significant added value from data that has been trapped in aging and often unsupported systems.

Finally, a key aspect of any successful application decommissioning project is working with a reputable, proven supplier with extensive history in application decommissioning and the requisite technical certifications in enterprise content management. That supplier will likely have a track record serving customers in highly regulated industries where it is easy to run afoul of regulatory requirements, as well as a consultative perspective to help organizations objectively assess their application portfolio and create a roadmap for decommissioning legacy applications.

APPLICATION RETIREMENT FOR EMC INFOARCHIVEFor more than 20 years, Flatirons Solutions has provided enterprise content management consulting, technology and outsourced services to companies in content-intensive and highly regulated industries, such as aerospace, financial services, government, healthcare, hi-tech and publishing.

Flatirons is an expert in helping large organizations evaluate their content management and technology pain points and in developing solutions to meet requirements for specific uses cases.

Flatirons has worked with EMC as a certified solutions partner for a number of years to help organizations develop and deploy application decommissioning solutions

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using the EMC InfoArchive platform. Flatirons’ Application Retirement for InfoArchive solution reduces the high costs of maintaining legacy applications so IT departments can do more with less. Applications that are no longer actively used are identified, and a low-maintenance solution is installed to replace the expensive and hard-to-maintain applications. These applications are effectively decommissioned and a new, standards-based solution is implemented on lower-cost and more efficient hardware. The old applications and hardware are gone, thus removing the high cost, and the data is migrated over to an XML-based repository that has access to the legacy data and rigorously meets compliance and legal retention requirements.

With Application Retirement for InfoArchive, organizations are experiencing compelling return on investment with payback in as little as six months. These results come from slashing the maintenance costs of keeping outdated systems up and running and freeing up precious IT resources to work on new projects critical to the business.

Other benefits of the solution include:

• An unprecedented, unified view of previously siloed data.

• Expanded, more insightful business analytics and reporting.

• Lower compliance risk using a unified, state-of-the-art platform.

Flatirons is also a member of the InfoArchive Consortium, an alliance of companies with a common interest in legacy application decommissioning, active data archiving, database archiving and customer communications archiving. In the area of legacy application decommissioning, the InfoArchive Consortium leverages Flatirons’ expertise.

CONTACT USTo learn more about how Flatirons in partnership with EMC and the InfoArchive Consortium can help solve your application decommissioning challenges, please contact your local Flatirons representative at www.flatironssolutions.com.