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 This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .