Flatirons works with organizations across heavily regulated industries to develop data archiving and application retirement strategies. Data archiving includes the extraction of data from outdated, unsupported legacy systems; transformation of the data to a non-proprietary format; and loading of the data onto a cost-effective data archiving platform.
Once this process is complete, organizations are able to turn off, or retire, costly legacy applications in order to reduce their IT budgets while meeting ongoing data retention and compliance requirements.
The case for application decommissioning is straight forward, producing tangible ROI through cost savings, simplified IT infrastructures, and a stronger ability to meet audit requirements.
While many organizations opt to deploy their data archiving platforms internally, there is another option that offers even greater return on investment: Hosted Data Archiving.
Hosted data archiving is one of the cloud computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offers that, Forbes reports, “will hit $21.9B in 2016, more than doubling to $44.2B by 2020.”*
The arguments for hosted data archiving echo reasons why cloud computing continues to grow at a rapid pace:
- Cost
a. Lower startup costs – Cloud-based options for data archiving require less investment than on premise options. IT budget isn’t tied up in production, development, QA, or hardware and software to create an archive infrastructure or application retirement process. The hosting provider supplies the infrastructure and expertise, leaving more savings that can be applied to other strategic projects.
b. Flexible price points – In addition to a lower cost of entry than on premise models, hosted data archiving offers more flexible price points. The hosting provider typically breaks licensing units into smaller parts based on the amount of data archived.
c. Pay-as-you-go, or for only what you need – Hosted options let you control costs based on what you need. For example, data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) is one of the key aspects of most archiving solutions. The transformation of application data for the archive is a temporary but resource-hungry process. It’s costly to purchase a system just for ETL. Most hosting providers can scale their systems to meet your ETL processing needs and then scale it back when done, allowing you to “rent” the power and capacity you need for a short term at a fraction of the cost of buying and owning the same capability.
2. Speed – Data archiving and application retirement service providers have dedicated infrastructure and established processes that streamline data archiving and application retirement using their hosted platforms. Dedicated platforms and established processes result in optimizations for moving data from development to QA, pre-defined test strategies, and reusable UX design patterns to name a few benefits.
3. Focus – Let your IT focus on core business needs – While legacy data must be archived for regulatory purposes or is kept for strategic business reasons, the requirement to maintain legacy data may not outweigh the cost of managing archived data in house. IT departments are busy enough supporting daily requirements and strategic projects. Relieving them of data archiving tasks through a Cloud service provider helps ensure success for strategic projects while simultaneously meeting ongoing data archiving requirements.
As you research data archiving and application decommissioning strategies, consider a hosted solution. It may provide even greater return on investment than you anticipated.
*”Roundup Of Cloud Computing Forecasts And Market Estimates, 2016,” Forbes, Mach 13, 2016
