Through Technology
Solving digital and technology challenges
Aged Data, New Power: Centralise to Save and Thrive in the AI Era
Organisations today face the challenge of retaining and managing vast amounts of aged data—information no longer actively used but essential for compliance, analysis, and historical reference. Many business systems lack robust data retention and disposition controls, amplifying risks and inefficiencies. A strategic, centralised digital archive and records management solution transforms this challenge into an opportunity. By breaking down data silos, enabling legacy system decommissioning, ensuring regulatory compliance, and unlocking analytical potential through AI, such a solution delivers operational efficiency, cost savings, and strategic insights. For senior leaders, the case for a centralised archive is compelling.
Breaking Down Data Silos in Legacy Applications
Legacy business applications, often decades old, store critical data in isolated silos. These systems—outdated ERP platforms or bespoke departmental databases—fragment data, making it inaccessible for enterprise-wide analysis. A centralised digital archive consolidates data from these disparate sources into a unified repository, preserving its integrity and context. By extracting and mapping data to a standardised schema, organisations eliminate silos, enabling seamless access. This consolidation opens new opportunities, reduces duplication, and ensures aged data remains a valuable asset for decision-making.
Enabling Decommissioning of Legacy Systems
Maintaining legacy systems is costly and risky. Ageing hardware, unsupported software, and dwindling expertise inflate expenses and expose organisations to cyber threats. Decommissioning is complicated by the need to retain data for compliance or historical purposes. A centralised digital archive resolves this by securely migrating data to a modern, scalable platform. Once archived, legacy systems can be retired, slashing maintenance costs and freeing IT resources for strategic initiatives. For example, at HM Courts and Tribunals Service, our strategic digital archiving solution has enabled the decommissioning of legacy applications and exit from third-party datacentres, saving millions while retaining access, security and management of the critical data within.
Managing Retention and Disposition for Compliance
Many business systems lack built-in data retention and disposition controls, leaving organisations vulnerable to non-compliance with regulations like the EU’s GDPR, UK Data Protection Act, and US CCPA. GDPR mandates data minimisation and the right to erasure, requiring organisations to retain personal data only for specified periods and dispose of it securely. Non-compliance risks fines up to €20 million or 4% of annual turnover. A centralised archive automates retention schedules, flagging data for deletion when requirements expire, and ensures auditable disposition records. By embedding compliance into workflows, organisations mitigate risks, overcome legacy system limitations, and avoid manual data management chaos.
Unlocking Analytical Value with Clean, Structured Data
Aged data, when clean and well-structured, is a goldmine for AI and advanced analytics. Historical data can reveal trends, inform predictive models, and drive strategic decisions. However, data in legacy systems is often unstructured, inconsistent, or poorly documented, limiting its utility. A centralised archive enforces data quality through the ingestion process, applying consistent metadata tagging, aligning to an organisational data model, breaking the dependency on proprietary formats and creating a cohesive dataset ready for analysis. By integrating with AI platforms, the archive transforms dormant data into a strategic asset, enabling innovation and competitive advantage without impacting the operation and performance of your key business systems.
The Strategic and Operational Benefits
A centralised digital archive delivers multifaceted benefits:
- Cost Efficiency: Decommissioning legacy systems reduces IT maintenance costs, often saving millions annually for large enterprises.
- Risk Mitigation: Automated compliance with GDPR and other regulations addresses deficiencies in business systems, minimising legal exposures.
- Operational Agility: Consolidated data enables faster decision-making and cross-functional collaboration.
- Analytical Power: Clean, consistent and accessible data unlocks the opportunities of analytics and AI-driven insights, from operational optimisation to customer personalisation.
- Scalability: Cloud-based archives handle growing data volumes and the processing load of analytics without impacting live or legacy system capacity, ensuring performance remains unaffected.
Overcoming Implementation Challenges
Implementation requires strategic planning and technical expertise. Leaders must secure stakeholder buy-in, aligning IT, legal, and business units. Data migration demands robust ETL (extract, transform, load) processes to preserve integrity. Security is critical… archives must employ encryption, access controls, and audit trails to protect sensitive data. Partnering with experienced vendors and adhering to standards like ISO 15489 for records management can streamline deployment and maximise value.
The Path Forward
Aged data, often a liability due to inadequate retention and disposition controls in business systems, becomes a strategic asset with a centralised digital archive. This solution breaks down silos, enables legacy system decommissioning, ensures compliance, and unlocks analytical potential. For organisations pursuing digital transformation, a centralised archive is a strategic imperative. By investing now, leaders can future-proof their data strategy, reduce costs, and harness AI to drive innovation. The alternative—persisting with fragmented, ungoverned data—is a risk no forward-thinking organisation can afford.
Author: Peter Hanney is CEO of Through Technology limited, A former solution architect with 25+ years of experience working on secure digital transformation, legacy technology and data challenges for the UK Government.
techUK and TechSkills at London Tech Week
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