Application Archiving
The Solution
We all have heard how data is growing by leaps and bounds. We have gone from Terabytes, to Petabytes, to Exabytes, to Zettabytes, and in the not too distant future Yottabytes. No, a yottabyte is not named after the greatest Jedi ever although you may wish you had a Jedi Data Center Manager to manage all that data and keep it secure and tell you what you no longer need to maintain. According to analysis done by IDC, all the data growth equates to increased complexity in the data center. The amount of data center hardware increases by a factor of 10 and data growth increases by a factor of 14 in enterprise data centers. Not to mention, the number of resources to manage all this expansion will only increase slightly and their skill sets and experience will become more specialized and harder to find. IDC projects that while all this explosive growth is happening, the number of IT professionals will only grow by a factor of 1.5. In a nutshell, the data center and it content is growing in a frenetic way and so is the cost to manage it. In addition, there is still the ever present constant demand to do more with less.
Budgets are still tightening, and our human resources are being stretched thinner and thinner to support more applications, manage more servers, and maintain more databases, etc. Today’s CIO is frantically trying to manage the day to day business to keep it running all while trying to stay ahead of the competition. If you are responsible for running the IT shop how do you strike a balance between the explosive data growth, the constant budget drain for day to day operations, staying ahead of the competition, and maintaining a healthy workforce? How do you distribute the funds across these areas and more importantly where do you find them? Application Archiving can help you alleviate some of that data center expansion burden, reduce your application support requirements, reduce your maintenance costs, free up precious human resources and allow you to regain a significant amount of your operating budget.
Application Archiving is a process to reduce your hardware, software, maintenance, and labor costs for your legacy applications. Application archiving helps you identify your legacy applications and methodically consolidates the data from the disparate systems to a single homogenous compute stack. At its core, “Application Archiving” is about reducing the cost to run your IT department by eliminating unnecessary support cost (maintenance, hardware, data center, etc.) and still provide you with access to your application data via query screens. Based on a Forresster survey of over 1,000 software decision makers, in both North America and Europe, about 66% of IT organization's capital and operating budget is spent on maintaining existing applications, which leaves about 34% for new development. Imagine still having access to your data without having the cost burden.
Application Archiving works with any type of data from Mainframe flat files to RDBMS tables. All the data from the various applications consolidated to a single repository but it is kept separate so different data access rights can be granted to each application. Each application can be managed per its requirements and data retention needs. Stringent QA processes are followed to ensure data integrity and chain of custody are maintained so everything is defensible.
Application Archiving is NOT Application Decommissioning. Your applications are still on-line and available for query. Should you have a legal requirement to provide information, the data is on-line and ready for instant query. You do not have to spin up a darkened application just so you can report against its content.
Imagine being able to flip your IT budget from an ANNUAL 60-70% support cost to only a 30-40% Annual support cost leaving you 60-70% of your budget for new IT initiatives. This now allows you to provision more strategic IT initiatives or fund other business endeavors. To learn more about this powerful budget freeing process, please contact us at truSYZYGY. We will be happy to discuss with you how application archiving can help your business.