Decommissioning Legacy Labs: How to Cut Costs Without Losing Data Intelligence

The Hidden Value in “Dark Data”

Pharmaceutical companies often sit on petabytes of “Dark Data” information generated in failed trials, retired lab applications, and completed projects. This data is often ignored or deleted to save space.

This is a strategic error. Research shows that “unexplored” areas of the genome and historical failure data often hold as much therapeutic opportunity as well-studied areas. “Negative data” (knowing what didn’t work) is arguably more valuable for training AI models than positive data, as it prevents the model from repeating expensive mistakes.

Cost Reduction meets Innovation

CIOs are under pressure to cut costs. Maintaining legacy Lab Information Management Systems (LIMS) and Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN) solely to keep the data accessible is a massive drain on the IT budget.

Solix Active Archiving offers the solution:

1. Retire the Application, Keep the Data

Solix allows you to decommission the legacy application eliminating expensive licensing and maintenance fees while extracting the data and moving it to a low-cost, compliant archive.

2. Fuel for AI (Active Archiving)

Unlike cold storage (tape), Solix provides Active Archiving. The data remains live, searchable, and queryable. It becomes a permanent part of your Semantic Content Library, ready to be mined by Predictive Analytics models for future insights.

3. Traceability & Compliance

In Pharma, you can’t just delete data. Regulations often require retention periods of 10-25 years. Solix ensures full Traceability, maintaining the lineage and context of the data (“Who created this molecule in 2010?”). This ensures you are always audit-ready for the FDA while turning your legacy cost center into a future innovation asset.