Informatica Corporation announced the availability of a new report by Ventana Research outlining five key opportunities for IT organizations to significantly reduce their "Keep The Lights On" budget through efficient data management and thus free up funds for more strategic IT activities.
According to the Ventana Research report, it is essential for IT organizations to go beyond just assessing systems for potential savings through consolidation and other measures. IT must also start assessing existing data-related processes for optimization as their streamlining can deliver equally valuable savings and reduce the KTLO budget even faster. The report advocates focusing on the following five opportunities in this arena for the greatest and most rapid impact.
1. Reduce Costs with Data Archiving across Systems - With proper archiving required for compliance and the operations and sustained performance of many applications, Ventana Research recommends making "data archiving an essential IT activity that is automated using data integration technologies." This enables archiving processes to be consistent across systems and applications, avoiding the costs of maintaining specialized archiving processes and custom interfaces for each application..
2. Automate Data and Application Interfaces to Streamline IT - According to the report, ensuring readily available, consistent and high quality data is the crux of information management. At a time where data must be easily accessible across many systems and business process, many organizations are hampered by a proliferation of point-to-point, custom data integration interfaces and siloed data quality processes, leading to runaway development and maintenance costs and suboptimal business intelligence. Ventana Research believes that "utilizing a common process and technology can ensure that the business's data quality and integration needs are met efficiently and can reduce IT operating costs."
3. Retire Outdated Applications with Information Lifecycle Management - While there might be sound reasons to retire an aging application, too often they are kept on life-support because of the importance of the data. This approach that can cost millions of dollars a year per large application. In contrast, an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) approach ensures that data from retired systems is processed, archived and kept accessible as needed to other applications and users. Ventana Research believes that "IT should adopt application-focused information lifecycle management to provide significant cost reduction and new efficiencies in IT operations."
4. Find Value and Integrate Legacy Systems Efficiently - According to the report, "in most sizeable organizations, systems more than 10 years old" drive more than one-third of underlying business processes. The costs of maintaining point-to-point system interconnects across these processes are enormous. Using as a model an organization supporting six legacy systems, each with a dedicated resource person, Ventana Research posits that "by standardizing data integration across legacy systems, the organization can reduce the headcount of technicians to two in the first year and to one individual the following year, saving $800,000 in year one and $1 million in year two."
5. Simplify IT and Reduce Coding through Data Integration - Organizations frequently deploy custom-coded or proprietary routines to replicate and synchronize data across systems, and they support these costly routines with largely manual processes. Suggesting that many of these tasks can be automated and managed from one tool, Ventana Research believes that "establishing a common method to integrate data across enterprise applications can reduce the operating costs of these systems while eliminating the need for dedicated resources that specialize in supporting data integration for each application, database and custom program.
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