intro.
Identifying Legacy Applications for Retirement
A legacy application can be thought of as any application in a data centre that is no longer necessary to support day-to- day operations. This could mean an application that does not support any current business activities, or one whose data has been transferred to a newer application while the older application lays dormant, causing unnecessary strain on resources, storage, and manpower.
While most organizations are well aware of the dangers involved in allowing unused legacy applications to continue to clog organizational databases, the question is how do organizations arrive at this situation in the first place?
How Do Applications Become 'Legacy' Applications?
Applications become ‘legacy’ applications for a variety of reasons, although this evolution typically occurs due to:
- Application replacements or upgrades.
- Consolidation projects.
- Mergers or acquisitions
Why Do Organizations Retain Outdated Applications?
Any time an organization continues to maintain applications that are no longer used in day-to-day operations; the underlying factor is usually the fear of losing access to important data by closing down the legacy application. In earlier years, that was a valid fear.
tHE MZ CONSULTING LIMITED OPTION (MZCL)
INTRODUCTION
We at MZ Consulting Limited present the following option in guiding the Institutions Group through the use of Records Management concepts to effectively retire legacy applications in Institutions.
The importance of the records in the legacy applications cannot be over emphasized. The records represent the base financial history of Institutions. These come in the form of transactions over accounts over the years. They serve the purpose of research and audit and particularly information for regulatory and compliance.
The MZCL LEGACY APPLICATION RETIREMENT OPTIONTM presents archiving this valuable data using Record Management. This is significant as they have become records that need to be managed primarily for safe guarding and at the same time serve as a source of information for the bank.
Records Management is the science that enables the bank to keep all its documents together in an organised and indexed manner with multiple searches, functionally based on searchable metadata as the bank wants it and how best to store it.
Data can be extracted into the following formats:
- CSV – Suitable for MS SQL, Oracle, Informix etc
- PDF – Suitable for Document Management Systems
- MDT – Suitable for both Relational Databases Management Systems and Document management Systems as metadata for indexes.