Some BaaN systems may be candidates for application retirement or decommissioning. Older legacy systems are often left running well after they are removed from production service only to maintain end user access to the data. Obsolete, duplicate, and unused applications are a big drain on IT budgets, and retiring these applications can pay tremendous dividends by freeing staff, reducing license and maintenance fees, and lowering power cost.

Many data center consolidation projects are launched to rationalize application portfolios. Gartner estimates that 10% of applications running in an un-optimized portfolio are candidates for retirement and an additional one-third should be migrated or rationalized.

Accurate test data improves application development quality which is why the most demanding application development teams require that their test data be populated from production databases. As a result it is not unusual for a Test Data Management (TDM) program to maintain multiple full clones of the production database for use as test and development instances. Because so many organizations clone production data to populate their test environments, creating test data is time consuming, costly and may expose an organization to compliance issues.

Solix EDMS Test Data Management automates the creation and management of database subsets and clones based on organization-defined business rules. Solix EDMS Test Data Management creates syntactically correct subsets of production data for the most realistic testing possible. Instead of creating full-sized database clones, subsets provide accurate application testing results while saving time and reducing data storage costs up to 70%.

As a security best practice data masking protects sensitive non production data which is often exposed in training, testing, development and offshore environments. Because it de-identifies or scrambles sensitive data with fictionalized, but syntactically correct substitute data, developers and testers maintain necessary realism and sensitive data is properly secured.

Masking sensitive test data is not a choice; it’s a compliance requirement. Solix EDMS Standard Edition Data Masking is a free download that makes adhering to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and Protected Health Information (PHI) guidelines easier.