Why application retirement is important
The life cycle of an application is between 3 and 10 years, while company data often has to be stored for up to 30 years for legal reasons. This leads to various challenges:
- High operating costs: legacy systems generate unnecessary costs, especially in the event of mergers or insolvencies.
- Complexity and inefficiency: Migrating inactive data to new databases makes them less efficient and highly complex from the outset.
- Support problems: Experts for older technologies are hard to find.
- Security risks: Security gaps are often no longer updated.
You should be thinking about application retirement in your company now at the latest.
Application Retirment with CHRONOS
CHRONOS is a manufacturer- and application-independent solution for archiving company data that accesses the underlying relational database directly and archives the application data. CHRONOS supports a wide range of current systems as archive storage, regardless of whether they are hosted locally, in the cloud or by a partner. Audit-proof archiving in open archive format meets all legal requirements, and data can be exported in IDEA format if required.
With automatic deletion functions at the end of the retention period and SQL commands for easy data evaluation, CHRONOS offers maximum efficiency. The user-friendly Archive Explorer allows end users to access numerous decommissioned applications from a single interface. This is supported by a secure, granular authorization system with LDAP/IAM connectivity.
CHRONOS not only helps you to decommission legacy systems, but also to free active production databases from inactive data without losing access.
Use case: Schlecker insolvency
Despite the insolvency in 2012, the former drugstore chain Schlecker continues to work closely with the insolvency administrators with over 30 employees in order to wind up the company in an orderly manner. A central focus is on the careful storage of all necessary data, which should be accessible to the insolvency court in the long term. This data and information must still be reliably retrievable even if no former Schlecker employee can be contacted.
In this context, the software CHRONOS supports:
- Shutdown of legacy systems through database archiving. This makes all information permanently accessible.
- Comprehensive archiving of all emails from former employees.
- Archiving of files and documents on a separate system that can be accessed by the insolvency administrators.
During this process, CSP helped to prepare seven different systems for shutdown and provide a standardized interface for database archiving. As a result, it is now possible to easily research and find information from various systems. The implementation by CSP ran parallel to ongoing operations and was completed on schedule. Archiving the data is of crucial importance in order to guarantee the pension entitlements of former employees in the long term.
The application of archiving legacy systems may also be of interest to other companies looking to reduce costs, facilitate information retrieval and ensure compliance. Decommissioning legacy systems offers an economically attractive solution that can also be of great interest to companies with a strong market position.
All advantages of CHRONOS
- Cost reduction through legacy system decommissioning: Legacy systems can be decommissioned while all information remains accessible via a standardized interface.
- Compliance with documentation obligations: Archiving of emails and documents enables accurate compliance with legal documentation requirements at reduced ongoing costs.
- Consolidation and centralization of data: Consolidation of different systems into a unified database archive facilitates quick and easy retrieval of information for subsequent queries and pension claims from former employees.
- Support for compliance regulations: Data archiving in accordance with compliance regulations such as GDPdU ensures that required information can be properly provided.
- Long-term availability of data: Ensures that necessary data will still be available in a few years’ time, e.g. for pension claims.
