Capital Allocation & Application Retirement in Cybersecurity

Artificial intelligence is accelerating technological advancement and there is an onslaught of new technologies coming to market with its own promise of revolutionizing cybersecurity. This makes strategic capital allocation in cybersecurity more important than ever.

When I was an investment analyst, you looked for CEOs that were the best in capital allocation because those were the stocks that you wanted to buy. Those companies consistently outperformed their competitors year after year. The same fundamental laws apply to cybersecurity because effective capital allocation in cybersecurity strengthens protection and drives overall business performance.

And budgets are finite, so with new AI-driven solutions being introduced at rapid pace, security managers need to consistently review their technology stack to identify applications, systems, and platforms that cost more to maintain than the value they are delivering.

The challenge is that legacy systems contain valuable data that the business may need to retain for legal, regulatory, or compliance reasons. Sunsetting older solutions and migrating the data is complicated. The key is to develop a consistent playbook that streamlines the process as much as possible.

Voltage helps you simplify the application retirement process so you can improve performance, reduce risk, and cut costs while retaining access to your historical data.

These are some of the benefits to be realized by retiring outdated applications:?

• Cost Savings: Retiring outdated applications reduces software maintenance costs, license fees, and support expenses.
• Increased Efficiency: Removing obsolete applications reduces complexity, streamlines processes, and enhances efficiency.
• Improved Security:?Eliminating vulnerable legacy systems helps the organization improve its cybersecurity posture.
• Resource Optimization: Retiring legacy applications means you can reallocate IT resources and personnel to more strategic initiatives.
• Agility and Innovation: Application retirement enables the enterprise to embrace modern technologies and respond quickly to market changes.
• Data Integrity: Migrating or archiving data from retired applications helps ensure data integrity and compliance with regulatory requirements.

OpenText can help you develop the repeatable application retirement program you need because Voltage Structured Data Manager gives you increased visibility into the underlying application data so you can decide what to archive versus what to migrate to a new system, reducing cost and risk. And OpenText has archiving solutions and services to help you as well.

Here's how to think about the process:

Step 1: Build the Business Case

Legacy systems often incur hidden costs, such as outdated security measures and specialized personnel. In contrast, modern solutions offer streamlined operations and enhanced security.

You’ll need to also consider the short-term investment of time and resources to migrate the data to an archive or other system and sunset your legacy application. You’ll need a level of effort analysis, a migration plan, and the evaluation and purchase of any software solutions to facilitate the data migration.

Voltage helps you with the level of effort analysis by giving you increased visibility into the application data in on-premises, cloud, or hybrid systems. Additionally, Voltage gives you the insights you need to classify in-scope data for disposition, defining archival, protection, deletion, or any other action based on company policy.

You also want to understand how users expect to access the data once the has been migrated to ensure continued availability to the records you need. Factors like age, relevancy, regulatory and legal requirements all come into play here. Migrating from one data model to another can be involved, yet Voltage gives you the insights you need to simplify the process.

Step 2: Develop & Test the Data Migration Plan

The primary objectives in this phase are to minimize downtime and ensure data integrity. Voltage ensures continuous availability and protects against data corruption during the transition. While there will always be inherent risk in any migration, Voltage helps you to control for it as much as possible.

Before migrating your data, you want to test that users can still access the data and are sufficiently trained on how to do so. You can't use real production data for testing, development, and quality assurance so you want a data set that is anonymized to comply with privacy regulations yet still delivers the insights you need to ensure proper functionality.

Compiling test data manually is laborious, time consuming, and introduces risk. Instead, Voltage automatically renders new secure and compliant test data that looks and acts like real-world data but ensures no real customer or sensitive data is present. Then you can test and validate the migration path to ensure that all data will be transferred accurately and completely. Once you’re ready to migrate production data, Voltage ensures that the data in transit is well-protected.

Step 3: Secure Data Analytics & Anonymization

After the migration, you want to ensure that your analysts can still safely and securely run queries and reports on trends and business patterns. Voltage's advanced encryption and tokenization technologies allow the pseudonymization and anonymization of any structured data type, in any quantity required, across all languages, promoting secure data sharing without requiring the data to be unprotected and re-protected.

And Voltage has integrations for Snowflake, Amazon, Google, and Azure to streamline processes and enable you to conduct high-scale secure analytics while protecting business-sensitive information and ensuring compliance with global privacy standards and regulations.

Step 4: Continuous Optimization

After project completion, Voltage enables you to track and monitor all database activities across the enterprise in real-time with alerting that promptly notifies you of policy violations so you can proactively respond.

You also gain further insights into how and where data is used, which may point to other data sets that might be archived to reduce cost and risk. By continuously monitoring and optimizing your systems, Voltage helps you maintain a robust cybersecurity posture and adapt to evolving threats.

Key Takeaways

The pace of innovation in cybersecurity solutions is accelerating so security managers need a repeatable process for decommissioning older solutions and repurposing the capital for newer technologies. The main obstacle is migrating the data in a way that ensures availability and data integrity. Voltage gives you the solutions you need to understand your data, decide what to archive versus migrate to a newer application, and protect your data in transit during the migration.

OpenText has the tools, resources, and expertise to help you through the process. Contact us today if you want an initial consultation about how we can help you.

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