Choosing the right application retirement solution can make the difference between a successful legacy decommissioning with accessible data and a costly project that leaves you with locked-away information. In this article we provide a structured framework to evaluate your options and select a platform that matches your business needs.
Start with your business drivers
Ask: Why are you retiring applications? Typical reasons: high maintenance/licensing costs, end of vendor support, strategic transformation, M&A consolidation, regulatory demands. Clarifying the goals enables selection of the right capabilities.
Key evaluation criteria
Data coverage & extraction – The solution must support data from your legacy applications: ERP, CRM, mainframe, custom apps.
Archive accessibility – Archived data must be searchable (full-text, metadata), reportable and user-accessible (self-service).
Retention and legal-hold functionality – The solution must manage policy-based retention, legal holds, purges and audit logs.
Compliance & governance – Encryption, role-based access, data lineage, chain of custody.
Cost & business case – Evaluate licensing, archive-storage costs, migration effort, and potential savings from shutting down legacy systems.
Scalability & architecture – Must handle large data volumes and support cloud, hybrid or on-premise as required.
Vendor expertise & support – Implementation complexity is high; choose a vendor with track record in legacy application retirement.
Decommissioning capability – The platform should allow the legacy application to be retired (shut down) without losing data access.
Checklist for vendor comparison
What legacy systems have you retired before?
How many TB/PB of data handled?
What is the user experience for retrieving archived data?
Can users perform self-service search and reports?
What security/compliance certifications are offered?
What are the migration, validation and purge workflows?
What real-world cost savings have customers achieved?
Common pitfalls to avoid
Choosing an “archive” that is just cold storage – no search or access = locked data.
Underestimating the migration effort and validation of legacy data.
Failing to align retention/purge rules with business/regulatory requirements.
Ignoring user experience – when data is hard to retrieve, business users will resist.
Not planning for decommissioning – legacy app remains active and continues draining costs.
How a solution like Application Retirement Solution addresses the criteria
The platform supports retiring legacy applications across many systems, provides user self-service, full-text search, metadata management, policy-based retention, legal-hold, audit logs and a pay-as-you-go business model that enables cost savings to fund the solution.
Implementation roadmap suggestions
Inventory legacy applications and data volumes.
Define retention, legal-hold and access policies.
Choose a pilot application to retire.
Execute extraction, migration, validation and purge.
Decommission the application infrastructure.
Roll out to remaining legacy systems. Monitor savings, governance and user acceptance.
Conclusion
Selecting the right application retirement solution is not about buying another tool — it’s about choosing an enabler for governance, cost-control and digital transformation. With the right platform and execution, retiring legacy applications becomes a strategic lever.