Application Decommissioning in Digital Transformation

Transcription

1 Application Decommissioning in Digital Transformation Produced by In cooperation with MARCH 2018

2 CONTENTS Role of Application Decommissioning in Digital Transformation 3 What is application decommissioning?... 4 Benefits... 4 Legacy data a significant challenge... 4 Archiving reduces costs... 5 Delete, Archive, Migrate Getting to Grips with Legacy Data.. 6 Choice of archive platform affects cost and flexibility... 6 Choosing a data archiving partner... 7 Sector experience is important... 7 A good partner can support the client beyond migration THE ROLE OF APPLICATION DECOMMISSIONING IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

3 ROLE OF APPLICATION DECOMMISSIONING IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Public sector organisations all recognise the need to embrace and deliver digital transformation. The combination of acute pressures on resources and the growing expectations of citizens creates an unavoidable mandate for the modernisation and improvement of the services provided by the public sector. While the first generation of digital transformation projects in the public sector tended to focus on the user interface, it is now clear that simply focusing on the web experience is not enough. In order to deliver effective and sustainable digital transformation, the processes and systems at the core of service delivery must be modernised. Genuinely sustainable transformation can only be delivered by considering the processes that support service delivery from end-to-end. Many of the core services provided by public sector agencies are built on systems and platforms that were implemented many years, even decades ago. While it is often possible to update an existing application to make it more flexible and fit for digital, there will be many cases where an ageing application cannot be effectively adapted to support new business processes. In these situations, the legacy application will need to be replaced with a newer solution. However, for reasons ranging from regulatory compliance through to long-term civic obligations, data in old applications will often need to remain accessible for many years. In these cases, IT departments must decide how to make that legacy data available. Often this reflects a choice between: Running a legacy application in read-only maintenance-mode for the sole purpose of retaining data Using suitable data archiving and retrieval technology Undertaking to migrate data directly out of the legacy application into its replacement. This paper describes the different approaches that organisations can take to application decommissioning, and looks specifically at data archiving as an option that is often overlooked. THE ROLE OF APPLICATION DECOMMISSIONING IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION 3

4 What is application decommissioning? Application decommissioning is a strategic approach to systematically retiring applications either because they are no longer cost-effective to maintain, or because they cannot be effectively adapted to support new processes. In most cases, this must be achieved at the same time as providing access to application data and content to support the organisation s business processes while also ensuring that compliance requirements continue to be met. Benefits The decommissioning of legacy applications and the effective archival of their data and content can bring benefits in a number of domains: Supporting transformation by making it easier to implement new services that continue to depend on the legacy data. Reducing operational costs by eliminating costly servers, licensing fees, data centre costs and administration overheads. Risk reduction by removing fragile and unsupported environments, securing data and content in an accessible repository, and managing against compliance regulations including retention policies. Legacy data a significant challenge Application decommissioning can enable an organisation to break away from the limitations imposed by out-of-date or legacy applications. However, many organisations will be obliged to retain the data held in the legacy applications in order to comply with regulatory requirements. In some cases, data may only have to be retained for a short period of time, but in others there may be a legal obligation to retain the data for many years. For example, while minor transactions relating to the issue of parking permits may only need to be retained for 7 years, medical records may need to be retained for several decades. In cases like the Essex Fire and Rescue Service, the data in the legacy application had to be transferred to the new solution because it was effectively live data. But In 2016, the Essex Fire and Rescue Service developed a new asset management solution to replace an aging platform that had become costly to maintain and very difficult to adapt. The new solution provides a host of new features, most notably around the ability to access and update data from mobile devices. A key requirement of the new platform was that the existing data held by the older application had to be transferred to the new one. When implementing the new solution, the data migration proved to be the biggest challenge: not only did the data have to be extracted from an older storage format, but a great deal of effort was also required to reformat and cleanse the data as part of the migration process. One of the key lessons learned in this transformation project was that it is vital not to underestimate the challenge of data migration. It is important to invest time and effort up front to model the data, evaluate its quality, understand how it is to be used and develop an appropriate migration plan. the challenge of migrating data from an old application into a new production environment can be significant. Wherever possible, the goal should be to either purge or archive data before embarking on the time and cost of migrating it from one environment to another. 4 THE ROLE OF APPLICATION DECOMMISSIONING IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

5 Simple guidelines are: 1. Delete what you can The storage and management of legacy data incurs a cost whatever mechanism you choose to store it, so only retain the data you need to. 2. Migrate what you must A proportion of the data contained within a legacy system will be live, because it is required to support current business processes, and is likely to be accessed and updated. This data will need to be transferred to a replacement system. 3. Archive the rest Any data that cannot be purged, but is not needed to support current business processes should be archived. It is worth noting that the process of purging and archiving should continue after the new application has been deployed. Archived data should be purged according to pre-defined retention policies, and data should be archived from production applications as soon as it is appropriate to do so. Deleting data that is no longer required will reduce migration and operational costs By purging data that is no longer required, projects can reduce the costs and risks associated with the transition from the legacy application to its replacement. The cost of data migration can be significant given the data cleansing and transformation that is often necessary, and once it has been migrated there will be ongoing costs associated with storage and management. Keeping data beyond the required retention period can also expose the organisation to liability under data protection legislation that covers the right to be forgotten, and the citizen s right to ask the organisation to provide copies of any information it holds on them. By identifying the data that can be purged early on in the transformation process, projects can avoid the constraints and risks associated with its retention and migration. Archiving reduces costs Many production systems host a significant amount of data that is no longer required, except in occasional circumstances or in order to comply with data retention requirements set by regulation. In some instances, this data can amount to the lion s share of the data maintained by an application; in effect, organisations are paying software and licensing fees to maintain data that they no longer need on a day-to-day basis and perhaps may never need to access again. In a Health setting the presence of patient data in a variety of legacy systems makes it difficult to give clinicians a complete view of the patient s overall health. For example one large Health organisation were moving to a new Patient Record Solution but maintaining legacy systems presented them with clinical and IT challenges. We had a significant amount of unstructured legacy data that could not be practically converted to our new Epic EHR system, says Lore Chapman, Vice President and Chief Enterprise Architect for Lahey Health. We needed this data somewhere it would be accessible to our clinicians in an efficient manner, taking advantage of user and patient context. With the help of OpenText Documentum, we ve made patient information that wasn t migrated into Epic available inside of Epic Hyperspace with one click. Our clinical providers are thrilled with the seamless access to patient data, which they have as a result of Clinical Archiving, a unique approach to this challenge which many organizations in the industry face. David Reis, Ph.d., CIO, Lahey Health. THE ROLE OF APPLICATION DECOMMISSIONING IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION 5

6 DELETE, ARCHIVE, MIGRATE GETTING TO GRIPS WITH LEGACY DATA LEGACY DATA Once the decision is made to replace a legacy application, the project should audit the data that is held by the application that is due to be retired. The goal should be to aggressively purge any information that is no longer required, identify information that can be archived, and then to develop a plan for the migration of data that needs to be transferred to the new system. DELETE IDENTIFY AND DELETE ELIGIBLE DATA DEFINE POLICIES THAT WILL BE APPLIED TO THE DELETION OF ARCHIVED DATA ARCHIVE IMPLEMENT POLICIES FOR THE PERIODIC PURGING OF ARCHIVED DATA MIGRATE DEFINE POLICIES THAT GOVERN WHAT DATA SHOULD BE ARCHIVED IMPLEMENT POLICIES FOR THE REGULAR ARCHIVING OF ELIGIBLE DATA Choice of archive platform affects cost and flexibility Having identified the data that can be archived, the next step is to decide how it should be stored in order to provide the greatest flexibility on one hand, while costing as little as possible on the other. One approach that some projects have taken is to continue to run the legacy application in read-only mode, but with a smaller number of users, or on the basis of a specially negotiated licence fee. This has the superficial benefit of being minimally disruptive, while providing a way to access the legacy data when necessary. In practice, however, it can be an expensive option that means that the organisation is still tied to the application they wanted to replace, even to the extent that the retired application must be upgraded in order to remain in support. Instead of retaining the legacy application, organisations can implement a dedicated archive platform which will enable them to completely retire the legacy application while also providing a way to manage the archival and purging of data on an ongoing basis. There are a number of factors that organisations should consider when looking at archive solutions. These are considered in the chart on the following page. 6 THE ROLE OF APPLICATION DECOMMISSIONING IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

7 Factors organisations should consider when looking at archive solutions Open Archive Formats Flexible storage options Support for the information management lifeycle Support for access control and information governance The archive solution should store archive data in open formats, rather than the proprietary formats used by the legacy applications. This is important as a means of ensuring that archived data will continue to be accessible long after the original application has been retired The ability to store archived data on tiered storage can have a significant impact on running costs. A comprehensive archive platform should take advantage of lower cost storage, including cloud storage, while enabling the access and management of the archived data The archive solution should provide support for the ongoing archival of data from the new application, as well as providing a means of purging data from the archive according to the organisation s retention policies. The effective support for information governance is a fundamental requirement under data protection and privacy legislation. The ability to effectively manage who can access archived data, and what archived data can be accessed is essential when the archive contains personally identifying information. This is particularly acute when that data is of a highly personal nature like medical records, financial transactions, or data relating to children or vulnerable adults. The archive platform should provide for user access control, data masking (which provides for the selective obscuring of sensitive data), and the auditing of data access requests. Choosing a data archiving partner When selecting a data archiving platform, organisations should consider the supplier and their capabilities as well as the technical features of their product. Ideally, organisations should be looking for a partner, rather than simply selecting a technology supplier. Sector experience is important Suppliers that have experience in the same sector as the client will bring a good deal of relevant experience to the project they will understand the specific challenges faced by the client organisation and will be able to bring lessons learned in other engagements to the project. A good partner can support the client beyond migration While much of the effort in product and supplier selection will be focused on ensuring a smooth transition from the legacy environment to the new one, it is important that the project also consider the role of data archiving in the ongoing operation and management of the new platform. A good partner will be able to provide advice and support well beyond migration, enabling the organisation to effectively manage the lifecycle of the information held by the new application. THE ROLE OF APPLICATION DECOMMISSIONING IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION 7

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