OCIE Information Management
Legacy Data Assessment
Eight quick questions. You’ll get a clear read on your situation and a step you can act on today.
Results Guide
Data Result Mapping and Branched Profiles
What Should You Do With Your Legacy Data?
Eight quick questions. We’ll give you a read on your situation and the smartest next step.
Want help answering these?
That’s exactly what a 30-minute Legacy System Assessment is for. We look at your specific situation and give you a plain-language summary of your options.
The Modernization Moment
Your situation: the system is leaving, but the records have to stay.
Retiring the application is the easy part. The hard part is everything inside it: the reports, the records, the history you’re still required to produce. Most teams underestimate this and discover late that “decommission” quietly turned into “migrate,” which is slower, costlier, and riskier than expected.
The trap is data migration. Moving records from an old database into a new one often means the databases don’t match, so someone has to reformat and then validate every record by hand. That validation labor is where retirement projects stall and budgets blow up.
Before you do anything, find out:
- Does your retirement plan actually preserve access to the old records, or does it assume a migration nobody has scoped yet?
- Who will validate that migrated data is complete and accurate, and how many staff hours does that take?
- Can your new system even archive the old system's outputs, or is it only built for new data going forward?
Want help answering these?
That’s exactly what a 30-minute Legacy System Assessment is for. We look at your specific situation and give you a plain-language summary of your options.
Your situation: you may be asked to produce records you can't quickly reach.
When an auditor, examiner, or e-discovery request lands, the clock starts. The risk isn’t usually that the records are gone. It’s that they’re scattered across systems, slow to pull, and hard to prove are unaltered. “We have it somewhere” is not the same as “we can produce it, and prove it wasn’t changed.”
The exposure most teams miss is the audit trail. Producing a record is only half of it. Being able to show who accessed what, and that nothing was altered, is what actually satisfies a regulator.
Before you do anything, find out:
- If an examiner asked for a specific record from five years ago today, how long would it actually take to produce it?
- Can you prove your historical records haven't been altered since they were created?
- Do you have a complete access log showing who viewed which records and when?
Want help answering these?
That’s exactly what a 30-minute Legacy System Assessment is for. We look at your specific situation and give you a plain-language summary of your options.
The Costly Continuation
Your situation: the real cost isn't the line item you're looking at.
The maintenance invoice is the visible cost. The bigger one is hidden: the staff hours spent babysitting the old system, the specialized knowledge tied up in keeping it running, and the risk you’re carrying every month it stays up. Teams cut the licensing line and miss that the true spend is in people and exposure.
The quiet risk is dependency on a shrinking group of people who still understand the old system. When they leave, the cost of getting data out goes up, not down.
Before you do anything, find out:
- What does each legacy system cost per year fully loaded, including staff hours, not just licensing and hosting?
- Who still knows how to operate or extract data from your oldest systems, and what happens when they retire or leave?
- What are you actually paying for — new capability, or just keeping the lights on so you don't lose access?
Want help answering these?
That’s exactly what a 30-minute Legacy System Assessment is for. We look at your specific situation and give you a plain-language summary of your options.
The Retrieval Roadblock
Your situation: you own the information but can't reliably get to it.
When records live in systems you can barely access, or spread across formats that don’t talk to each other, every request becomes a project. The cost shows up as time: days spent assembling something that should take minutes, and the constant low-grade risk that you’ll be asked for something you can’t find at all.
The trap with mainframe and legacy output specifically is that the data is often technically “there” but unusable without specialized parsing, and the tools that extract it frequently charge per use, so getting your own data out costs you every single time.
Before you do anything, find out:
- When you extract data from your legacy systems, are you paying per-use fees, click charges, or CPU charges to access information you already own?
- How long does a typical report or records request actually take from ask to delivery?
- Is any of your historical data effectively unreachable right now because the system or expertise to read it is gone?
Want help answering these?
That’s exactly what a 30-minute Legacy System Assessment is for. We look at your specific situation and give you a plain-language summary of your options.
The Mid-Migration Maze
Your situation: the new platform is the focus, the old data is the afterthought.
Migrations concentrate everyone’s attention on standing up the new system. The old system’s data tends to get handled last, under time pressure, which is exactly when records get dropped, corrupted, or quietly abandoned. The new platform almost never carries the full historical record, and “we’ll deal with the old system later” becomes a permanent, expensive holding pattern.
Before you do anything, find out:
- What is the actual plan for the old system's historical records once the new platform is live, beyond "keep the old system running"?
- Will the new platform retain the old system's outputs, or only handle data created from go-live forward?
- Who is accountable for the legacy data after the migration team disbands?
Want help answering these?
That’s exactly what a 30-minute Legacy System Assessment is for. We look at your specific situation and give you a plain-language summary of your options.
The Bandwidth Burden
Your situation: this is a problem you'd rather hand off than own.
You’ve decided, correctly, that maintaining legacy data infrastructure isn’t the best use of your team. The risk now is in the handoff: a DIY internal fix tends to break and pull IT right back in, and the wrong vendor arrangement can recreate the same dependency in a different place. The goal is to offload the problem entirely, not relocate it.
Before you do anything, find out:
- If you solved this internally, how many ongoing IT hours per month would it actually consume?
- Does a vendor option fully manage hosting, maintenance, upgrades, and security, or are you still on the hook for parts of it?
- Is the pricing flat and predictable, or does it grow with storage, reports, or usage so your costs creep over time?
Want help answering these?
That’s exactly what a 30-minute Legacy System Assessment is for. We look at your specific situation and give you a plain-language summary of your options.
The Deep Archive Dilemma
Your situation: scale and age are working against you.
Decades of records across multiple systems, some of it mainframe output, is the hardest version of this problem. The volume alone makes any manual approach untenable, and the oldest data is usually the most fragile, both technically and in terms of who’s left who understands it. The longer this sits, the more expensive and risky it gets to resolve.
Before you do anything, find out:
- Do you have a full inventory of which systems hold what, or is "we're not entirely sure" part of the problem?
- For the oldest systems, is the institutional knowledge to extract data cleanly still on your team?
- What's your retention requirement per record type, and are you confident you're currently meeting it across all of these systems?
Want help answering these?
That’s exactly what a 30-minute Legacy System Assessment is for. We look at your specific situation and give you a plain-language summary of your options.
The Preemptive Pivot
Your situation: you're ahead of the problem, which is the best place to be.
Most organizations come to this after something forces it: a vendor end-of-life notice, an audit, a migration, an acquisition. You’re looking before the clock is running, which means you have options that disappear once it becomes urgent. The smart move now is simply to understand your exposure so you’re not making decisions under pressure later.
Before you do anything, find out:
- How many legacy or aging systems do you have, and what would happen to the records inside them if each were shut off?
- What are your retention requirements, and could you prove access today if asked?
- What is keeping those older systems running actually costing you each year, fully loaded?
Want help answering these?
That’s exactly what a 30-minute Legacy System Assessment is for. We look at your specific situation and give you a plain-language summary of your options.
