In a continuously evolving business landscape, companies often find themselves burdened with outdated legacy systems. While once very critical to the business, they now pose significant challenges and complexities. Such systems, ranging from old hardware to unsupported software, can impact operational efficiency, increase costs and introduce numerous security vulnerabilities. This is where SAP legacy system decommissioning becomes the best way forward. Let's learn more about this process in this article. Continue reading to unfold valuable insights about this topic.
Exploring the strategic reasons for decommissioning legacy systems
After a particular period of time, businesses accumulate a significant amount of data that is spread across different legacy systems. Even though such systems are infrequently used, they do contain data that is critical for organisations for various purposes. From businesses to compliance associated with tax requirements to data privacy, and so on. That's why retaining the legacy data is essential for companies. However, it comes with a cost, which significantly drains your valuable resources. As a matter of fact, according to a recent study, it has been observed that more than 70% of companies' IT budgets are spent on the maintenance of legacy systems.
So, what's the solution to this problem? Well, the short answer is SAP legacy system decommissioning. Shutting down outdated systems provides cost-saving opportunities for organisations, enabling them to allocate their valuable resources to adopting modern technologies. That said, here are some of the key strategic reasons to decommission your outdated applications:
Improved security
One of the key elements to consider about legacy systems is that they are vulnerable to security threats. This is because outdated systems are not updated with the latest security patches. By retiring them, you can breathe a sigh of relief as the process helps eliminate the risks of potential security threats and cyberattacks.
Significant cost savings
With the help of the decommissioning process, you can significantly contribute to lowering your operating costs. Outdated systems are not only difficult to maintain but also costly to operate. Moreover, you also have to upgrade them from time to time, which also further puts more pressure on your finances. With the system decommissioning process, you can seamlessly eliminate licensing costs, resource expenses, and infrastructure overheads. Furthermore, you also have to remember that your spending is not just limited to data storage; there are other costs and factors as well, such as servers, runtime, operating systems and so on. As a matter of fact, maintaining your legacy systems comes with numerous hidden costs which are not really visible if you do not dig deeper.
Compliance with regulations
Remember that your legacy systems were designed many decades ago, and implementing ever-growing data privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, as well as other legal requirements, can be quite challenging. Moreover, non-compliance with these types of regulations can result in substantial penalties and reputational damage for your business. That's why opting for the SAP legacy system decommissioning process is one of the safest bets. It allows you to protect your company from the risk of non-compliance while performing an end-to-end system extraction.
Better system efficiency
Another one of the strategic reasons for initiating the system retirement process is to improve the efficiency of the systems. After a few years, your legacy systems become unmanageable and inefficient. More than contributing to your increasing business requirements, it needs continuous maintenance, leading to more technical debts. The decommissioning process allows businesses to enhance the efficiency of their system and operations by replacing outdated ones with faster, more efficient, and modernised solutions. As a matter of fact, system decommissioning is significantly important and invaluable when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, system migrations, moving to cloud solutions, and so on.
Green and sustainable solutions
Carbon emissions resulting from business operations have become a critical issue worldwide, playing a pivotal role in shaping sustainable business practices. Outdated systems consume more power, resulting in higher energy demands. You can easily eliminate this by retiring old systems. This way, you are not only reducing the complexity of your IT infrastructure but also making a significant contribution to your organisation's sustainability goals.
Important factors to consider before decommissioning legacy systems
The overall decommissioning process can become time-consuming and complex if key factors are not considered during execution. Here are a few critical things to consider while implementing the SAP legacy system decommissioning process:
Data extraction
One of the most important factors that you must keep in mind is data extraction. You have to analyse your data, documents, and reports to ensure a complete extraction of the information from your legacy application. The data extraction phase includes transferring data from the outdated system to a secure storage location that remains accessible for future compliance requirements.
Access to legacy data
While retiring your obsolete systems is critical for your organisation, retrieving legacy data for legal and tax compliance is also equally important. Moreover, it is also important to provide personal data protection compliance. Remember that new users in your company may not be familiar with the legacy systems, which is why it is essential to implement solutions that are simple and flexible, allowing anyone to navigate them easily. With this, you can ensure that the legacy data, even after completing the system decommissioning process, remains accessible to authorised users.
Data security
Perhaps one of the most critical aspects of your decommissioning process is the security of your data and entire IT infrastructure, which cannot be overlooked under any circumstances. Businesses must ensure the proper protection of data and encryption of sensitive information during and after decommissioning legacy applications, so that data is never lost or exposed. In fact, ensuring the security of the system is one of the most important factors when shutting down old legacy systems, which also involves activities such as securing all access points and protecting against potential vulnerabilities. Here are some of the key security checklist points that companies must follow:
- Ensuring complete extraction of the legacy data
- Maintaining end-to-end encryption
- Proper user management
- Precise authorisation management
- Maintaining audit reports and activity logs
- Ensuring tax-related data traceability
Conclusion
As studied in this article, the SAP legacy system decommissioning process is one of the most effective and preferred methods to let go of old systems and streamline the entire IT infrastructure. This efficient process also helps businesses save costs, achieve their sustainability goals, and improve the overall business operability. However, make a note of this point that this process is quite time-consuming and complex, for which you must seek help from an expert to successfully complete the decommissioning project and yield desirable outcomes from it.
