Solix ExAPPS Brings New Relief to Application Retirement Anxiety
People may come and go but applications live forever. Well, not exactly, but that mindset leads to the application retirement problems that many organizations face today. Often applications remain intact and running on corporate networks long after their useful life is over but gracefully shutting them down is no simple matter. However the recently released Solix ExAPPS appliance provides organizations a new option for retiring these applications while alleviating the uncertainty normally associated with such decisions.
Application functionality, architecture, or business rules often change over time that can render an application obsolete that leaves an organization's application portfolio less than optimized. In a research paper, Plan Legacy Application Retirements Carefully, Jim Duggan, a Research VP with Gartner, makes the following observation, "On average, 10% of the applications in an un-optimized portfolio are candidates for retirement. An additional one-third can require migration or rationalization."
In an era of economic downturn, where companies want to squeeze costs and do more with less, all sizes of companies, from SMBs to large corporations, are recognizing the value of application retirement. This is done as much to reduce costs and simplify the IT infrastructure as it is done to eliminate the need to migrate or virtualize seldom or minimally used applications.
Considering that many enterprise organizations have numerous applications spread across many server platforms with numerous database servers on the backend, the value of decommissioning these application servers quickly becomes evident. However application retirements go beyond just the hardware and software costs. Maintaining and managing the infrastructures needed to support legacy applications takes expertise, often specialists.
Aggravating the situation, as an organization continues to run old applications on legacy hardware or out-dated software versions, the available amount of expertise in the within an organization or marketplace continually diminishes. This increases the risk of losing all expertise associated with an application; running applications that are unsupported or require high-maintenance; and, having data in-house with no one being able to access or interpret data in a knowledgeable fashion.
So while the cost benefits of retiring applications may be clear, the risks associated with application retirement can be vague. Consider:
Therefore before any solution is introduced that facilitates application retirement, it must satisfy the following criteria:
Organizations only need to use a Web browser to point the Solix ExAPPS at an identified target application's data using a Web browser. Once it sees the application, ExAPPS begins the process of migrating all of the application's data, including its objects, reports, and the context of how the application data is used and referenced, to the Solix ExAPPS secured repository in an immutable form. This process guarantees data can not be modified and remains safe to meet compliance requirements.
Since this is a fully automated process, it a repeatable and eliminates the manual, ad hoc nature of past application retirement attempts that relied heavily upon consultants, system integrators and third parties utilities and migration tools.
Once an application is retired and the data moved over to the Solix ExAPPS appliance, business users or IT can query the ExAPPS appliance and report on the legacy data using standard enterprise reporting tools. While the data is stored in a proprietary database (the Solix Secure Archive), it is accessed using a standard SQL engine so standard database query methods will work.
Depending on how the Solix ExAPPS is utilized, organizations may see even further savings. ExAPPS compresses legacy data by up to 90% and a single Solix ExAPPS Appliance can replace multiple physical servers, applications and storage in the data center thereby significantly reducing operating budgets and increasing operational efficiencies.
The benefits of shutting down aging or unused applications are easy to see but as anyone knows who has ever been asked to turn such an application off - you hate to be the one responsible for pushing the button only to have someone request the application data later on. The Solix ExAPPS takes these concerns about application retirement off the table. Using the Solix ExAPPS appliance, organization can quickly and easily deploy a solution that enables them to achieve their goal of cost-effectively application retirement.
Application functionality, architecture, or business rules often change over time that can render an application obsolete that leaves an organization's application portfolio less than optimized. In a research paper, Plan Legacy Application Retirements Carefully, Jim Duggan, a Research VP with Gartner, makes the following observation, "On average, 10% of the applications in an un-optimized portfolio are candidates for retirement. An additional one-third can require migration or rationalization."
In an era of economic downturn, where companies want to squeeze costs and do more with less, all sizes of companies, from SMBs to large corporations, are recognizing the value of application retirement. This is done as much to reduce costs and simplify the IT infrastructure as it is done to eliminate the need to migrate or virtualize seldom or minimally used applications.
Considering that many enterprise organizations have numerous applications spread across many server platforms with numerous database servers on the backend, the value of decommissioning these application servers quickly becomes evident. However application retirements go beyond just the hardware and software costs. Maintaining and managing the infrastructures needed to support legacy applications takes expertise, often specialists.
Aggravating the situation, as an organization continues to run old applications on legacy hardware or out-dated software versions, the available amount of expertise in the within an organization or marketplace continually diminishes. This increases the risk of losing all expertise associated with an application; running applications that are unsupported or require high-maintenance; and, having data in-house with no one being able to access or interpret data in a knowledgeable fashion.
So while the cost benefits of retiring applications may be clear, the risks associated with application retirement can be vague. Consider:
- Organizations lack expertise in the application retirement process. This results in an inability to zero in on which applications should be retired
- Organizations cannot quantify which underlying application data needs to be retained. This creates apprehension and risk when considered against the backdrop of compliance requirements and different federal and state regulations.
- Budgets are already tight. Obtaining funding for additional resources can be difficult, especially when those resources are high-paid consultants and the applications scheduled for retirement often are already included as line items in the organization's budget.
Therefore before any solution is introduced that facilitates application retirement, it must satisfy the following criteria:
- The application context of legacy data must be preserved. Not only must objects, columns, and attributes be preserved but an understanding of how an application's logic interprets codes and the relationships between data so the application data still makes sense should it need to be retrieved and referenced in the future.
- Data is stored in an accessible format. Regardless of data format for an application, data must be stored in a compatible format. If a legacy application uses a backend database that contains binary large objects (BLOBs) then the storage repository for retired applications should be able to accommodate and efficiently store these types of objects as well.
- Store all legacy data stored in a single location. This makes it simpler and more efficient to find and retrieve later on should the requirement emerge.
- All legacy applications should be considered to have unique data reporting requirements. These requirements should be fully supported by any BI tools that are put in place after the application retirement.
- An open or standard access method should be used. While it is difficult to predict data access methods in the future, storing data in formats that are considered open today increase the likelihood that the data can be retrieved at some point in the future.
Organizations only need to use a Web browser to point the Solix ExAPPS at an identified target application's data using a Web browser. Once it sees the application, ExAPPS begins the process of migrating all of the application's data, including its objects, reports, and the context of how the application data is used and referenced, to the Solix ExAPPS secured repository in an immutable form. This process guarantees data can not be modified and remains safe to meet compliance requirements.
Since this is a fully automated process, it a repeatable and eliminates the manual, ad hoc nature of past application retirement attempts that relied heavily upon consultants, system integrators and third parties utilities and migration tools.
Once an application is retired and the data moved over to the Solix ExAPPS appliance, business users or IT can query the ExAPPS appliance and report on the legacy data using standard enterprise reporting tools. While the data is stored in a proprietary database (the Solix Secure Archive), it is accessed using a standard SQL engine so standard database query methods will work.
Depending on how the Solix ExAPPS is utilized, organizations may see even further savings. ExAPPS compresses legacy data by up to 90% and a single Solix ExAPPS Appliance can replace multiple physical servers, applications and storage in the data center thereby significantly reducing operating budgets and increasing operational efficiencies.
The benefits of shutting down aging or unused applications are easy to see but as anyone knows who has ever been asked to turn such an application off - you hate to be the one responsible for pushing the button only to have someone request the application data later on. The Solix ExAPPS takes these concerns about application retirement off the table. Using the Solix ExAPPS appliance, organization can quickly and easily deploy a solution that enables them to achieve their goal of cost-effectively application retirement.
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