Let’s get straight to the point. You are here to know what is it called when the application retirement, and here’s the answer.
It is called application retirement!
Yes, it is a thing because software applications don’t live forever and are bound to retire in due course of time.
Application retirement, also known as application sunsetting, application decommissioning or application neutering is the fundamental practice of shutting down the obsolete business applications along with retaining the access to the data present within.
A lot of times, the legacy applications are maintained just for the sake to provide access to the data for the enterprise it belongs to, revolving around the business purposes.
While most of the enterprises don’t usually rely on it, it still is one of the best methods to deliver enormous cost savings and make the data flow easy.
Application retirement is such a process that usually involves the migration of the data from the legacy application database and direct it towards a data repository or archive store that could be accessed independently using the industry-standard reporting.
It even allows the IT departments to reduce the resources that are required to manage the data.
Just like every other circle of life,
Application retirement is another factor inside the Application Development Lifecycle. With time, applications are bound to outlast the whole value of their business and eventually cost more to maintain the business than their net worth.
Managing the application retirement
The management of retirement is just a phase in the unified processes of enterprises where the retirement efforts are managed as a separate project.
Simple systems are retired within a single iteration generally where the stakeholders are also informed about the going away of the system and the access is turned off gradually.
Quite obviously, it includes a lot of work for the non-trivial systems where notifications go out to all the stakeholders and the plans for replacements are also made functional with time.
Talking about the large systems, they require multiple iterations where you would commonly find that the retired systems can handle the critical business functionality by running the whole system to be retired and the system that is just replacing the same side by side.
When the stakeholders are satisfied, only then is the new system considered to be satisfactory and the old system is shut down for good.
This allows the capture of the entire data and understand the functionality of the new system by comparing the results to the old system and even have an option to revert back to the old system, given if something goes wrong.
It might sound like a costly idea, but it is often important for systems that are crucial for an enterprise.
A common second variation is the retirement of the system gradually. This is done when the systems are being developed incrementally and the old systems are retired at the same time as well. The portions of the old systems are replaced with the new ones.
This method could be much easier for the sake of managing the fact that everything is done at the same time, all at once.
The effect on the users must also be considered while this application retirement happens.