Friday, October 18, 2013

Legacy Decommissioning: Improves Efficiency and Lowers Cost of Ownership

Why is legacy decommissioning so important? Because keeping legacy systems alive means high costs for IT to cover maintenance of hardware and software. With aging hardware and software, the 'know-how' for using the systems diminishes quickly and often only a few people within an organization retain specific knowledge around the systems.
As regulated industry implements updated, more compliant solutions for their enterprise needs - legacy systems must be retired or removed from service. Many of these legacy systems contain critical data to meet regulatory requirements. What happens to the data stored in those legacy systems? Decisions must be made as to what data to migrate into the new system. What happens to the remaining data? Where is it stored or archived? How long should the data be stored?


USDM can support you in decommissioning your legacy systems. Our support includes:

1.  Preparing a system retirement plan
  • Determining roles and responsibilities for decommissioning
  • Preparing and executing risk management for decommissioning
  • Documenting the risk management approachDetermining which data needs to be retained and migrated into the new system
  • Identifying data that will be archived
  • Determining how data will be retrieved and formatted for archiving
  • Determining the actions required for ending internal and external support agreements
  • Determining change management required for retiring system(s)
  • Determining the approach for communicating the impact of system retirement
2.  Preparing a data migration plan
  • Document the approach for migrating data into the replacement system
  • Identifying the methods to be used for migrating and or converting data
  • Developing the test strategy and scenarios to ensure data integrity
  • Determine the acceptance criteria for verifying the migration
3.  Preparing a system retirement plan report to summarize the retirement effort

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