Analysing the Costs and Benefits of Legacy System Decommissioning

Obsolete servers are taking up space and possibly draining your IT budget. In the digital world, things are constantly changing and your business needs to keep up if you want to stay competitive. With changes in technology, your organisation may feel pressured to decommission legacy systems. It can be costly to maintain legacy SAP systems, but it contains historical data and documents that your business might need. With legacy system decommissioning, you can retire your old applications while keeping the necessary data and comply with data regulations.

Once you’ve analysed the systems you’ve reserved for decommissioning, you can conduct an audit of their data structures and interfaces, as well as the reports and analytics, maintenance costs, and the number of users. Training users in new appliances, understanding the legal requirements for the data contained on the system, and functionality from old systems that would need to be replicated are all things you need to take into consideration.

It’s important to compare the cost of maintaining the legacy application and the cost of decommissioning it. This will give you an idea of the ROI for the project over a certain amount of time. Here are some of the benefits of legacy system decommissioning:

It frees up IT budget

According to Information Week, up to 70% of a company’s IT budget goes towards maintaining legacy systems. Decommissioning legacy SAP systems can free up maintenance budgets, as well as reduce infrastructure costs and need for resources. With the money saved, you could invest it into more revenue-earning tasks and use it to improve existing processes. IT industries can’t afford to be behind, but high operating expenses make it really hard for most organisations to invest in new technology.

It frees up space

Legacy system decommissioning will simplify your storage requirements as there is no need for multiple systems. Most organisations are moving to cloud based computing, which will dramatically change the stacks on infrastructure used in application development.

Data preservation and accuracy

Since legacy systems are kept on to act as a data repository for auditing and reporting purposes, it’s important to preserve this data. Decommissioning ensures records are retained and managed as per your legal requirements. And since 100% of the data is extracted, you can rest assured your data will be accurate and consistent.

As more businesses begin to take notice of the value of decommissioning legacy systems, IT departments will run more efficiently. If you’d like to explore legacy system and SAP decommissioning in more detail and find out how Proceed can help, download our Decommissioning White Paper here.