Are you keeping legacy applications alive just because you might still need them?

If you are holding on to some of your legacy applications, it is often because of compliance, reference or regulatory reasons. Unfortunately, these obsolete systems with large amounts of data conflict with your company’s plans to modernize and digitize the whole business.

 And what about your plans for consolidating your IT infrastructure or moving systems to the cloud? Here’s what you win by implementing application retirement first.

A farewell to legacy applications:

Application retirement (also called application decommissioning or application sunsetting) is the process of shutting down obsolete applications while migrating the data they contain to standardized archives where this information will always be accessible.

The term ‘application’ also includes platforms, systems, hardware configurations, programming languages, and more. As for the content, we are talking about all types of information—most often data, images, videos, and documents such as contracts.

Here’s the business issue: a company keeps an aged legacy application alive in order to access it infrequently and retrieve some data from its database. But the maintenance cost of keeping legacy applications alive is prohibitively high because they are no longer supported by the vendor via standard support and maintenance contracts. 

Plus, an old system requires costly knowhow and specific hardware. Besides the costs involved, it also poses a risk: what if the system breaks down?

When is the time to go for application retirement?

Application decommissioning becomes an issue in the following situations:

• when you consider migrating business data to the cloud
• when your application reaches the natural end of its lifecycle
• when you are about to switch to a modern app to offer an up-to-date solution
• when you need to store, organize and manage sensitive data in accordance with data compliance regulations such as GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and CCPA.

The problem is that old systems—the ones you’re probably using—were not designed with compliance regulations in mind. They never delete any information and they were not built to clearly demonstrate that you respect retention periods.

Decommissioning an obsolete application results in faster processes and the opportunity to spend your budgets in a more meaningful way. Let’s have a look at the top benefits to decide which departments could be involved first. It is mainly the CFO, the Head of IT and the Compliance Manager who should be interested—and involved to achieve one or more of the following goals:

• Cost reductions
• Better information accessibility and information sharing
• Reducing operational risks
• Increasing compliance
• Preparing for migration to the cloud

“Old systems were not built to demonstrate that you respect data retention periods.”

Prepare well:

Application retirement needs solid preparation. The old complex systems do not always reveal everything at first glance. You should specifically consider: (1) the ability to organize data extraction, (2) the speed of exporting data and search, (3) the level of simplicity when adding new searches, and (4) the ease of use of the new archive.

With Docbyte, you can count on implementing solid application retirement—your gateway to digitalization—with the highest level of professionalism. Not only will you work with experts in data migration, but you will receive free training and onboarding.

Another benefit of teaming up with Docbyte is that our solution is compliant with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, eIDAS, Digital Services Act, E-ARK, and others. 

Plus, we host our solution on Amazon Web Services, complying with the highest security standards (ISO 27001), which makes us the perfect choice for industries such as finance & insurance, healthcare, and public sector companies and institutions. Let’s start talking about your application retirement today.