Optimize IT resources and budget with a legacy application retirement program

A  legacy system is an old method, technology, computer system, or application program, "of, relating to, or being a previous or outdated computer system." Often a pejorative term, referencing a system as " legacy" often implies that the system is out of date or in need of replacement. - Wikipedia

50% of the average enterprise IT application portfolio is comprised of legacy applications. 65% of IT budgets are spent maintaining these applications. 20% of the legacy application maintenance budget is spent maintaining redundant legacy applications.

These are all great statistics but how does one go about actually decreasing their legacy application portfolio so that they allocate more budget to build out better IT capabilities?

Legacy Application Retirement vs. Legacy Application Modernization

I see a lot of legacy application modernization projects that convert a home grown system into a .net web application. I am always stunned that in 2016, people cannot find a vendor that can provide 80% of the functionality they need with the flexibility to allow clients the ability to customize the remaining 20%. I don't think they look very hard. The project is always massive and the new application is restricted by the data requirements of the old application. All the old data is converted to the new application. Any application that has been around for 10+ years has a lot of stale data that clogs up drop down lists and requires integration and report writers to deal filter out old data.

In my recent experience, cloud based solutions have become a far more efficient cost saver and less disruptive solution. However, what do we do with the legacy application that was replaced? It takes up database licenses, hardware and software maintenance just to keep it running in read only mode.

I have recently started working with a number of vendors that provide legacy application retirement (LAR) methodologies and software that allows companies to retire structured and unstructured data in a cloud environment where companies pay to store and retrieve their data when needed. Therefore, the database, hardware and software can all be decommissioned.

These LAR solutions allow companies to identify what data needs to be archived versus purged and even manage an expiration date. The LAR solutions allow companies to put sufficient meta data around the archived data to make sure it is understandable and queriable in 5 years time when everyone that supported and used the application have moved on.

Most of my clients resolve in the banking, trading and energy space where regulatory compliance is a major factor for sustaining legacy applications when they have become redundant and unsupportable. The new LAR solutions satisfy regulatory compliance requirements for these industries and are supportable in court due to the auditing and security capabilities that prove the data was not transformed during the archiving process.

If you are looking to find more IT budget to increase the companies IT capabilities, legacy application retirement archiving project may allow you to reduce free up resources.