EA Voices

Last week I talked about 5 Must-Have Characteristics to Enable Enterprise Architecture Successfully. This week I would like to talk about Data We Can Trust.
Over the last year, I have had the privilege to work with a large organization to help them rea…

By: Bill Cason, CTO, Troux

Three Factors for Managing Business Critical Applications

According to Microsoft, “In today’s corporate environment, enterprise applications are complex, scalable, distributed, component-based, and mission-critical.”

Does this sound like something you should be managing with spreadsheets and guess work?

For most organizations in today’s digital business environment, big enterprise applications actually drive the business. Companies invest a lot of time, resources and money into business critical applications so it makes sense to take the appropriate steps to make sure these applications are providing your organization with the value and service intended and not opening you up to unnecessary risk.

I have walked into large global enterprises still using spreadsheets to track the life cycle of all of their technology, expecting to be able to stay on top of what’s current and still supported and what’s nearing the end of active support. Mismanaging this data can lead to security vulnerabilities, failure of critical processes, corporate compliance issues and much higher cost of support, yet large organizations continue to rely on a method that has proven time and time again to be dangerously error-prone.

It’s hard to argue that a manually updated spreadsheet stored on a shared drive somewhere is a smart way to protect an organization from unnecessary risk and costs. Especially when there are automated, efficient and accurate tools out there to eradicate the issue.

By understanding the current business context, security vulnerabilities and costs associated with each enterprise application (something not possible by spreadsheet alone), an organization can confidently manage the risks, expenses and resources required to ensure your end users are getting what they need and the business is seeing value.

It sounds like common sense, but the first step is simply understanding how your applications support the business – specifically how are they tied to your goals and strategies, your processes, your capabilities, your policies and your organizations? Are the intended users actually using the software? Is it providing a service or gathering virtual dust while you continue to pay money to support it?

Second we need to understand where our applications may have security vulnerabilities. Once a technology reaches end of life and goes out of manufacturer support, no more security patches will be produced, meaning defense from hackers and other outside intrusions is instantly non-existent.  

Last but not least, identify the costs of maintaining each application. We often find that the most expensive applications are those built on old unsupported technology.  They will have higher support costs, more trouble tickets, are more difficult and expensive to maintain, and often utilize older and more expensive legacy infrastructure.

Once we put all of this data in the enterprise context we can take the guess work out of managing our application end of life program, because we now know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

Through an integration with BDNA Technopedia, the world’s largest repository of IT software and hardware information, Troux customers use our Enterprise Portfolio Management solutions to make informed decisions around planning, managing and retiring their End-of-Life application software efficiently.

Join our upcoming webinar “Taking the Guesswork out of Managing the End-of-Life for Enterprise Applications” Wednesday, September 10, to see a live demo with Troux and BDNA and learn how to automatically gain visibility into the entire technology asset lifecycle including End-of-Life dates for application software.