Four Tips for When to Use Application Retirement

Application retirement is and will be one of the main ‘next steps’ in many companies, most probably including yours. In this article, we will discuss the four most common scenarios when you should consider tips for application retirement and when to reach out for it.

With the growth of your firm or organization, you will have to find a solution to preserve massive amounts of data from different legacy applications.

This is usually due to regulatory compliance, e-Discovery, or the data business value. You need to store information but at the same time, you want the storage to have no impact on your running business activities.

That is the call for application retirement. How do keep business running and reduce costs while migrating data?

Tips for Application Retirement

Learn more about four tips for application retirement.

1. End-of-life (EOL) of a product

Products have their lifecycle—those at the end of it, are called End-of-life products. That means that eg. the software or tool you work with will no longer be supported by updates.

Why? Because the vendor of software has decided to ‘shut down the product—normally due to the unprofitability of further sales or development.

There will be no more actions from the vendor’s site regarding marketing, selling, or (software) updates for the product. A good example is the current ‘buzzy’ end of Atlassian server products.

However, the time from announcing the End-of-life of the product to its actual end of life usually takes two years minimum.

This time frame gives you an opportunity to prepare for switching to another solution. And, most importantly, to store the data you need despite the product’s end.

This is the moment when you should turn to the tips for Application retirement provided by professionals.

2. Data compliance regulations

Usually not a favorite topic, we know. But still, the one you can not avoid in any business containing private information.

According to several regulations, the data you keep must be secure, private, and safe from damage at all times.

For different types of businesses, different types of data protection regulations are required.

Here is to give you a few examples—is your business there, too?

• PCI-DSS and GLBA in the financial industry
• HACCP for the food, and beverage industry
• HIPAA in healthcare. In some cases
• CCPA for privacy rights and consumer protection for residents of California
• PCI DSS is an information security standard for organizations handling credit cards from the major card schemes
• GDPR setting guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information from EU-living individuals.

The problem with being a ‘compliant company or organization has to do with obsolete software or systems.

Since these were not built to demonstrate that you respect retention periods, Chief Regulatory Officers and Records Managers have to find a way how to manage, store, and protect data according to the regulations.

The logical solution is to switch to a new system—but there must be a gateway allowing your business to continue and to do the whole process in compliance with the regulations.

Closing the obsolete tool due to its regulatory offset is, therefore, best when done the application retirement way. The process of replacing old apps should not stop information from being vital for business operations.

3. Data migration

A big thing—moving data from the current system to another one—is an extremely demanding, costly, and time-consuming process.

If done properly though, it results in improved competitiveness, scalability, and speed. Take the migrating data to the cloud as a common example.

Based on the type and size of the business and the coding/IT skill set of the employees, the common types of data migration tools are:

• On-premises tools
• Open source tools
• Cloud-based tools

No matter the type, your data migration process should consist of these steps:

1. Identify, evaluate, and prepare the data you want to migrate
2. Plan the scope of the migration project + define roles in the process
3. Design the migration solution and follow it
4. Test
5. Execute
6. Validate
7. Shut down the old systems

Hand in hand with the data migration comes the shutting down of the old system. But it is oftentimes either too fast, or comes too late.

The validation of migrated data for completeness and the decommissioning of legacy data is the final part of the full data migration process.

4. Switching to a more modern app

Moving from one app to another can and should bring benefits but requires solid research before the act itself.

Also, one thing is to switch social media management tools in a company of ten people, other thing is changing CMS or project management software in a multinational corporation.

In the end, as important as getting a good app is bringing the data from one to another.

As for the right reasons to switch, it is pretty simple—it is either:

1. Money — you can use the full-featured version of the app for a price that is out of your budget
2. Features limitation — you need a tool that better suits your business/workflow/team in order to provide the service on the level you want to
3. Replacing solutions — you wish to have an all-in-one app, but instead work with several tools to cover other functions within your workflow (eg. spreadsheets, time tracking, internal communication)

When doing the research and choosing a new tool, you should consider if your favored one offers migrating data, too.

Sometimes the apps offer their very own tool, other times they provide you with a ‘how-to migrate’ guide.

But once again, if you need to migrate tons of data while being compliant with the law, the only realistic way is the application retirement—vital information that has to be preserved, will be stored in a centralized, easy-to-integrate, archive.

Have you found yourself in one of the four situations?

If so, then we should evaluate in detail how urgent is the application retirement in your case. Then, we will start with a decent preparation for the whole process, so it is as smooth as possible.

Whether the product you use is about to reach (or already have reached) the end of its life or you need to get compliant (or make sure you are compliant) with the data regulations, the Docbyte team of professionals will implement a solid gateway to digitization—application retirement.

And if you want to get prepared for big data migration, we will make sure you do it properly, consistently, and with the retirement of legacy data.

Last but not least, if you think about switching from one application to a new one that better suits your business, we are here to help you with storing data.

Let us know what is your situation or ask us anything that comes to your mind regarding your application retirement.