The sooner you start saving and investing for retirement, the more money you may accumulate for your golden years. Ironically a similar concept applies to your applications, the sooner you identify and shutdown your old applications and retain the data elsewhere, the more you can save operationally and refocus your resources on things that will help drive your business.
Application retirement is a cross industry solution that is pertinent for medium to large organizations that have a significant portion of their IT budget tied up in legacy systems that have outgrown their business value. The data is much less frequently accessed, if at all and is only required for read-only access, with no changes permitted. As much as 20% of an IT budget can be spent sustaining these systems. According to Gartner, app retirement is a subset of the database archiving market which is projected by Gartner to grow to $477M by 2014 with app retirement at approx. $286M in 2014.
So are you behind in saving your data for your application retirement? Or do you have the right solution in place to truly benefit? Here is a quick checklist:
1.When to start saving your data for app retirement. If you have some or all of the following tell tale signs, app retirement may be for you:
- Increasing volumes of data putting burden on your (also) aging IT datacenters
- Having to retain and access data for extended periods for compliance & competitive advantage
- Significant M&A increasing the number of duplicate and therefore redundant applications
- A desire to move to virtualization and cloud architectures.
2.Make sure you save enough. The good news is that storage technology continues to evolve, driving down the price per TB of both initial acquisition and ongoing operating costs. The bad news is that the amount of data you are required to retain on demand is increasing. With industry regulatory requirements and the increased desire for historical business insights, data can quickly reach petabytes. In order to truly realize the savings you expected you must ensure that you have the lowest TCO. This means gaining the highest data compression rates to reduce the physical storage footprint required, ensuring easy manageability and on demand accessibility to data, and the use of low cost commodity servers and efficient storage.
3.Diversification is critical. In addition to being able to store billions of records, the original schema structures for thousands of different applications will have to be retained. The app retirement platform and technology you select must support all dialects and unique characteristics of multiple contributing source repositories. Furthermore the solution should be hardware and storage agnostic, protecting you from wild swings in IT markets trends.
4.Make sure your data is safe and continuing to work for you. You need to guarantee that your data is secure, immutable yet accessible on demand to authorized users. The data should be tamper proof and the retirement repository must provide audit trails. Access through standard BI tools and SQL to query the data should be a given. If on demand access increases (users or frequency) it should be easy to add and scale servers to support the additional workload.
5.Your retired data should not outlive your needs. As critical as it is to retain data from retired applications, you need a plan to dispose of data that is no longer required. Data retained for compliance purposes can quickly turn into a liability once the retention period is up. You need to set policies and have your system enforce and execute expiry rules to handle the full lifecycle retention and automatic disposition of sensitive data.
There you have it. Even though some of your applications may be young, it’s never too early to plan for application retirement. Consult your app retirement specialist today!