Tag Archives: application retirement
Maximize the Potential Business Value from New Core Banking/Insurance Application Investments
According to the IDC Financial Insights 2013 Predictions report, financial institutions across most regions are getting serious about updating their legacy systems to improve reduce operating costs, automate labor intensive processes, improve customer experiences, and avoid costly disruptions. Transforming a bank’s core systems or insurance provider’s main business systems is a strategic decision that has far-reaching implications on the firm’s future business strategies and success. When done right, the capabilities offered in today’s modern banking and insurance platforms can propel a company in front of their competition or be the nail in the coffin if your data is not migrated correctly, safeguards are not in place to protect against unwanted data breaches, and if you are not able to decommission those old systems as planned.
One of the most important and critical phases of any legacy modernization project is the process of migrating data from old to new. Migrating data involves:
- Ability to access existing data in the legacy systems
- Understand the data structures that need to be migrated
- Transform and execute one-to-one mapping with the relevant fields in the new system
- Identify data quality errors and other gaps in the data
- Validate what is entered into the new system by identifying transformation or mapping errors
- Seamlessly connect to the target tables and fields in the new system
Sounds easy enough right? Not so fast! (more…)
Healthcare and Application Retirement Part 2
In this video, Richard Cramer, chief healthcare strategist, and Claudia Chandra, senior director, product management, ILM, Informatica, discuss healthcare and application retirement.
During this discussion (the second of two videos), Richard and Claudia cover the following topics as they relate to healthcare:
- Application retirement project scope
- Application retirement enterprise IT initiatives
- How application retirement is the fastest way for IT to save money now
The first video, which discusses the business case for application retirement and additional drivers for application retirement, can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7VHKY2tDlQ.
Data Storage Is So Cheap Its Expensive
The cost for 1GB of magnetic disk storage 20 years ago was $1,000 – now it’s eight cents. 1GB is enough to store about 20 thousand letter-size scanned documents. To store the same number of paper documents would require two four-drawer filing cabinets which would cost about $400. The cost of electronic data storage is five thousand times less than paper storage.
Costs have dropped consistently 40% per year which accounts for the more than 12,000 times reduction in cost since 1992. The cost for RAID or mainframe disk storage is somewhat greater, but the historical trend for other storage devices has been similar and the forecast for the foreseeable future is that costs will continue to decrease at the same rate. Twenty years from now we will be able to buy one tera-byte of storage for a penny. (more…)
Dodd-Frank Legislation and Structured Data Retention
The “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act” has recently been passed by the US federal government to regulate financial institutions. Per this legislation, there will be more “watchdog” agencies that will be auditing banks, lending and investment institutions to ensure compliance. As an example, there will be an Office of Financial Research within the Federal Treasury responsible for collecting and analyzing data. This legislation brings with it a higher risk of fines for non-compliance. (more…)
Seven Essential Best Practices For Data Center Consolidation
Data center consolidation is much more than physical movement of servers and infrastructure. In fact, the facility costs and power savings are just the tip of the opportunity. The biggest benefits come from using the consolidation initiative as a catalyst to rationalize the application portfolio, archive inactive data and establish one version of the truth for the data that is left. (more…)
Don’t Forget The Legacy Applications After Data Center Consolidation
As part of their cost cutting program, organizations are consolidating data centers and the applications within them. Federal and state agencies in the public sector are among those where IT consolidation and moving applications to the cloud are top priorities as part of an overall goal to increase efficiencies and eliminate costs. In other industries, many consolidations are also under way due to mergers and acquisitions and other cost cutting initiatives. As you plan or undergo a consolidation project, you also need to plan for the retirement of legacy, redundant applications that are left behind.
Eliminating Up To 95% Of Legacy Costs As Part Of Your Journey To The Cloud, With Application Decommissioning And Archiving
We’re all familiar with those legacy applications that no longer add value, but still absorb significant costs. These redundant applications may be left due to mergers and acquisitions, IT consolidation, business modernization, application migration, or moving to a cloud-based or software as a service environment. If you are an EMC customer, many of you may be undertaking projects to consolidate your IT stack to increase efficiency, and moving gradually towards a private or hybrid cloud environment. As you are virtualizing, re-platforming, and migrating your hardware and software, what do you do with the old applications that are left behind? (more…)
The Secret To Retiring Applications – Flawless Data Validation
Applications are retired (sunset or decommissioned) when they become dormant or read-only. This occurs as a result of mergers and acquisitions or through modernization efforts and is a natural part of Application Information Lifecycle Management. While the applications may be no longer needed, the data they contain cannot be discarded. As a result, many organizations have hundreds, even thousands, of defunct applications that are consuming budget dollars, taking up data center space, complicating IT management, and generally just getting in the way. The challenge is getting rid of applications without getting rid of the data which is tightly coupled to them. (more…)
ROI Tool To Help Make The Business Case For Database Archiving, Application Retirement, Test Data Management, And Data Masking
Though the benefits of containing the size of your databases by archiving seems obvious in terms of saving costs and improving performance, quantifying those benefits in terms of dollar savings requires more thought. The same is true when it comes to the costs that can be eliminated by retiring redundant legacy applications. Some of the savings may come from hard dollar costs such as:
- Storage
- Backup devices
- Maintenance contracts
- Software licenses (more…)
Realizing The Cost Savings of Mergers & Acquisitions by Retiring Legacy Applications
Following a Merger and Acquisition (M&A), there is usually a focus on consolidating the two companies’ IT systems, leaving behind many redundant legacy applications. Until those legacy applications are shut down, you haven’t realized the cost savings of the consolidation. However, those old applications may contain data that’s no longer used for daily operations, but need to be retained for regulatory compliance. Keeping those applications up and running, just to retain the data within them introduces operational, business and legal risks. It is likely that the IT staff who have the expertise about those applications are no longer with the company, and without them it may be difficult to impossible to access the data in a meaningful way, in the time required, for an audit or eDiscovery request.