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Legacy System Consolidation and Decommissioning

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Legacy System Consolidation and Decommissioning
�Options and Strategies to Decommission Systems and Reclaim IT Budget�

The Value of Keeping Data Must Be Questioned
Large organizations are often maintaining hundreds of legacy systems leftover from M&A activity, older best-of-breed solutions, desktop-based systems and departmental solutions that have not been integrated into ERP applications and core line-of-business applications.

Historically, organizations have often chosen not to decommission legacy systems, as many people are reluctant to give up data and the thought of doing so often invokes fear. This paradigm of keeping data forever is changing, however. Today, there are many advocates of smarter and slimmer data stores and corporate liability associated with keeping older data is causing organizations to implement strict data retention and destruction policies.

Consider Project ROI and Corporate Liability/Risk
Like other IT projects, identifying cost-savings from retiring a system and comparing the result to project costs is an important step in determining what the ROI on system decommissioning would be.

Corporate liability and policies mandating destruction of old data are also driving decommission, as is M&A consolidation in the IT industry that often leads to much higher maintenance costs for hardware and software. Some of the costs to consider in system retirement include:

� Data storage costs, including backup time and media
� Software license fees and upgrade fees
� Hardware and software maintenance fees
� Infrastructure costs including electricity
� IT staff including administration and upgrade costs

System Retirement Strategies and Implementation Options
Below is a list of some of the strategies that can be used to decommission legacy systems. Each of these strategies has pros and cons that should be considered carefully, if the strategy is feasible:

� Migrate data from legacy system to currently active system
� Capture data in magnetic format including tape and WORM
� Migrate data to a low-cost database like Access or MySQL
� Migrate data to ECM repositories using ECM tools
� Decommission SAP systems with SAP`s ILM product or DART
� Migrate data to a data warehouse solution
� Archive data and maintain old system if ROI is too low to retire the system

Taking a Bold Stance on Decommissioning Can Pay Dividends
Taking a bold stance toward system decommissioning can pay huge dividends. The cost savings can be significant and system decommissioning the return dollars to the IT budget for new projects. If you have a system retirement need, call us at 407-834-8324 or email us at rfp@auritas.com.

ARCHIVE

Keys to a Successful ILM Implementation:

More often than not, archiving projects having various implementations are started but very few are successfully completed. Often, the ROI that looked so attractive at the beginning is never reached or over time is deflated.

As a company that has done more than 50 implementations of Information Life Cycle Management methodology and tools, we have consistently seen the same factors that are indicative of successful implementations. Those factors are described...

In 2010 and beyond Companies using SAP are all in Survival Mode...:

Although these strategies are have been successful in someways , IT managers face continual pressure to further reduce the overall cost of the SAP infrastructure. This situation is aggravated by the current economic slowdown and reduced sales/revenues. Worry not, fortunately there are other options that we will explore in this article..

Data archiving is the buzzword among SAP customers right now. This article will not only illustrate the strong ROI potential. But you will also learn best practices and mistakes to avoid in setting up your SAP data archiving environment from Auritas, the experts in SAP Data Archiving.

Discovering and evangelizing the ROI in your ILM Projects - Thoughts from Seat 10D:

As the economic climate becomes increasingly less dependable, corporate cash flow is at a premium. As a result, funds for IT projects are disappearing�even if budgeted for this year. So being able to show a strong ROI for your project may be the most important supporting analysis in your presentation to get your project approved.

There are a couple of tools that we have been using for years to provide ROI support for our clients. Some cost distributions are easily available in public space; others are the result of our own experience with clients and our internal development. And I want to share them with you, here.

Data Compliance - Thoughts from seat 10D:

I was recently cleaning out my carry case and noticed among the minutes of the previous meeting or two, some good old SAP OSS notes in hardcopy that have been like friends to me, a shopping list, and various other SAP white papers and guides... I`ve recently been toting around some dog eared Records Retention Policy schedules.

Migration of EH&S templates to third-party storage solution:

Working on data archiving, I was exposed to a challenge of using Archive Development Kit in a non conventional way, but yet with similar outcomes. SAP R/3 allows clients to store business documents in a module called DMS (Data Management System).

Latest ILM thoughts--High-volume Material Batch Archiving issues & answers:

I have been working lately with one of our clients in the manufacturing industry who is implementing a new operating model on SAP Enterprise. Part of the design decision uses Variant Config and applying Material Batch records to every/all materials in inventory. The current volume of data is well over 250 gig for the Material Batch tables. The daily volume of new records after all divisions are implemented is 400,000 new batches.

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