Reducing the “Zombie Dollar” Spend in Your IT Budget

In today’s economic reality, IT departments are being asked to deliver more capability with smaller budgets. Keeping service levels high while reducing spending requires us to look closely at every dollar we spend. One of the largest drains on IT budgets is the support and maintenance of legacy and redundant systems. Along the same vein as Zombie apocalyptic movies, you could make the comparison that legacy or redundant systems in your company are being supported by “Zombie dollars”. Each year, we add systems to our legacy support list, and eventually our maintenance spending surges to become a significant part of our IT budget. These “Zombie dollars” are spent in the same way, year after year. We are not increasing our service levels or capabilities.  Do you want to find ways to reduce your IT spend?

Let’s take a simple use case from one of my healthcare clients. They want to reduce overall legacy IT spending specifically with legacy clinical applications such as EMRs. This client has over 100 legacy EMR/EHR systems that they needed to keep access to the legacy data, even if they did not want to keep supporting the applications. The analysis revealed that they spend 74% of their IT budget on maintaining legacy systems (i.e. software maintenance cost, IT resources, training, and data center, etc.). With their spending on legacy systems and production systems, there was no room in the budget to improve their capabilities.

So where’s the growth?

Allocating a majority of your IT Budget to supporting legacy systems is why I see this as “Zombie dollars”. There is little control or governance for the legacy budget spend and as years go by, more systems are moved to a legacy support status, so that portion of your IT Budget will grow.

So how do we find the solution for this spending surge? The answer is application decommissioning. Application decommissioning has been around for some time and there are many platforms to choose from. However, IT managers need an archiving platform that can meet the following needs.

• Can the archive platform support any application with a short ROI?
• Can it support both structured and unstructured data?
• Can it maintain your data integrity for compliance and legal reason?
• Am I just replacing one software maintenance cost for another?
• Do I have to retrain the user community on how to access this data?
• Can this help with reporting in my data lakes?

The Solution 

Alitek offers an archiving solution accelerator “High Value Archiving” using OpenText’s InfoArchive platform. InfoArchive allows you to store and view your high value information in one system where it can be shared, used, and accessed. This solution ensures that your archived data is accessible and isn’t lost or forgotten when migrating to a new system.

Benefits of this archiving solution include: 

• Ingesting terabytes of data from legacy or active platform(s) within the matter of weeks to streamline business
• Leveraging out of the box capabilities to enable viewing of the data for the required audience (no limit to end-users)
• Setting up access to the data for users without the constraint of per user license costs
• Realizing an immediate ROI by reducing the application maintenance and revenue recognition

Watch this short video to learn more about how Alitek’s High Value Archiving can help you reduce the “Zombie dollar” spend in YOUR company’s IT budget.

To learn more about how Alitek can help your organization reduce IT spending and free up funds for improving capabilities and increasing service levels within your IT department, please visit our website at www.alitek.com .

About Alitek

Alitek is a leader in information based digital transformations. We help organizations improve business outcomes, increase efficiency, and reduce risk, through better management of information. Our experienced team works with you to build a unique strategic plan based on your specific needs, no matter the size of your company.