Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

After a huge Christmas feast, there’s nothing better for the digestion than some light reading on the topic of decommissioning!

For anyone who finds themselves at work in the dying days of December, we hope you enjoy this round up of articles and blog posts related to decommissioning systems:

• Bayer IT Discovers When to Decommission Systems and Destroy Data
  This case study highlights the importance of considering legacy data as part of any system acquisition or upgrade, and describes some of the techniques Bayer used to determine possible uses for legacy data and how the organisation would approach decommissioning.
• Modernise or Migrate – Archiving Data Held in Legacy Applications
  This blog post from records, knowledge and information management consultants Recordkeeping Innovation identifies some of the risks associated with maintaining legacy systems past their best before date as well as some of the records and information management considerations of any decommissioning project.
• There Are Many Options for Managing Data After Application Decommissioning
  This research document from Gartner identifies some of the options for managing data after applications have been decommissioned.
  Note: You need a Gartner account to view this document.
• Why Legacy IT Is a Government Time Bomb
  This article reports on the United States CIO’s concerns about legacy IT systems.
• Comair’s Christmas Disaster: Bound to Fail
  This article provides an in-depth account of how the failure of a critical legacy system had severe consequences for a regional airline, and how various factors contributed towards the company delaying decommissioning the system.
• IRMS Podcast – Rich Hale on Active Navigation
  In this podcast UK recordkeeping professional James Lappin talks to Rich Hale, Chief Technology Officer of Active Navigation about how information professionals can use analytics and business intelligence capabilities to understand and take action on content held in repositories such as fileshares, SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange. Such tools may be of use during decommissioning projects.

Please note that State Records does not recommend or endorse any of the companies or technologies cited or promoted in the above!

Image credit: Nate Bolt = “xmas nap on shoe” (CC BY-SA 2.0)