Retire
Overview
The final option for an application is to retire the application entirely. Sometimes, applications are no longer needed, and it’s entirely possible that in very large IT estates, some applications may have not be in use, but are still running - it’s always worth checking before engaging on a potentially costly migration.
Benefits
| Time to migrate |  |
| Technical difficulty | |
| Strategic Value | |
Challenges
Switching off an application should be easy, but for many organizations, retiring an application can have some not in-significant costs.
For example if the application resides on dedicated hardware, then that hardware has to be removed and disposed of with respect to both security and any environmental regulations or considerations. This means that the retirement carries some significant cost, and those costs have to come from a budget somewhere - and since there is nothing additional being delivered to the business, the cost often needs to be borne by the IT organization.
It’s even worse if the hardware is not fully depreciated - then the asset stays as a cost on the financial books even after it has be decommissioned.
If the hardware is shared, then switching off the application may have a zero cost, but there are possibly zero savings too. For older, and especially smaller apps, there is often no dedicated maintenance or support team and the older the app and so the only.
In practice, closing an isolated single app is almost impossible to cost justify in the short term. The best practice is to run a retirement project which seeks out a significant number of legacy apps and hardware which has stopped delivering business value and so a set of applications and hardware can be dealt with as a cost-saving project and justified as a project with a dedicated budget.