Over time, applications can outlast their value to the business, eventually costing more to maintain than they are worth. But companies are reluctant to retire obsolete, legacy, or redundant applications for fear they may someday need the underlying data.
Data retention regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and HIPAA, require organisations to retain historical data in its original business context for specified periods of time. It is important to be able to capture and remove subsets of related data that make up a logical business object, such as payments or policies. Typically, these business objects are associated with other reference details using database key relationships or by means of the relationships defined in the application business logic.
Unlike ongoing archive projects that remove historical data from production systems, application retirement requires some special capabilities to ensure compliance:
- The data archived must be accessible independent of the original application.
- An archived action will, in many cases, only take place once for the data set.
- The data will never need to be restored as the application will no longer exist.
- All of the data is often archived based on business objects, not just the data not being moved to the newly consolidated system. This ensures that the data is archived in its original business context prior to any transformations.
Why Northdoor?
Northdoor has been providing application development and support services for more than 20 years to clients in business sectors as diverse as insurance, banking, property, media, retail, distribution, charity, local government, travel and recruitment.
Through our legacy applications management services capability, Northdoor advises clients on the issues around managing, upgrading and retiring a portfolio of legacy applications.
Northdoor’s application retirement services can help you address these challenges by carefully analysing the systems and identifying the data that need to be migrated to ensure their utilisation in the new applications. We can also help you implement InfoSphere Optim, an IBM software that can be used to archive and remove historical reference data safely.
Learn more about IBM InfoSphere Optim
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