We’ve explored how the corporate repository – a default storage location for archived and retired data – makes data storage a much easier and more cost-effective activity. We’ve discussed how the corporate repository can also streamline and enhance data governance.
Now, we’ll look at what has traditionally been the weak link in data governance: Application Retirement.
Up until now, companies have typically retired applications in an inconsistent, ad hoc manner. When the end of an application’s lifecycle arrives, most companies simply write the application to tape, stick the tape in a vault, and forget about it unless an audit or legal discovery process requires them to bring the application back online.
Of course, you’ve probably heard the horror stories about applications that were archived to tape, never to be recovered. As applications sit in the vault and people leave the organization, institutional memory tends to fade. Finally, the company will reach a point at which it needs to recover the application – but there’s nobody around who remembers where to find it, how to recover it, and how to access it meaningfully. The corporate repository solves this problem once and for all.
LEAVE RETIRED APPLICATIONS ONLINE
With a corporate repository tool such as IBM Optim, you can prevent this common backup tape nightmare by simply not using tapes as your primary means of archiving applications. Instead, you can leave a retired application online, but highly compressed in lower-tier storage according to your tiering strategy. Here, the application will be more accessible than it would have been on a tape, but cost-effective to store – due to the ongoing decrease in disk costs – and virtually impossible to lose.
Your next generation of IT staff will know exactly where to find the application. They’ll be able to access it using common tools. They’ll also be able to demonstrate during an audit that your organization meets regulatory requirements around maintaining access to application data and controlling that data through formalized processes.
A LARGELY UNTAPPED SOURCE OF SAVINGS
Even after 30 years in the business and two years with Estuate, I have to admit there aren’t many data points to support the importance of retiring applications to a corporate repository. But that’s only because the practice is so new and so few companies have tried it.
Check back with me in a year. We have been collaborating with IBM to implement Data Management Factories for several large clients who see huge savings from a regular program of archiving and retiring applications. We’ll do our best to bring these customer case studies to the forefront as soon as they’re available.
In the meantime, it’s not hard to imagine the types of benefits these corporations will achieve, in application retirement as well as in other areas of enterprise data management. The corporate archive repository gives companies a new layer of data archiving. Suddenly, tape backups become a disaster recovery strategy, rather than the main method of storage. And the initial incremental costs more than pay for themselves over time, in terms of hardware savings, power savings, man-hours saved, and much, much more.
