1.1 Financial data
Like everything, the software also has a limited lifetime. Either the software itself becomes obsolete, the requirements are changing, or it has to be replaced with a new one for other business reasons, like licensing or organisational change.
The company wants to change the software managing its data, but they still need to keep and provide access to these data for a few years according to the regulations. However, they do not want to change the data itself anymore; it's historical data.
Then the company has two options:
- Keep the old financial system up & running with the historical data for a couple of more years.
- Archive the data and decommission the application.
The regulations in Norway requires companies to keep financial data at least for five years, but other countries usually demand for a longer period, the worst I heard of was 25 years. Keeping financial systems up & running can be expensive, because of the license cost, maintenance, or if it's locally hosted, then the application related knowledge has to be kept alive.
The archive system also requires maintenance and could have license cost, but since it can carry on data from several legacy apps, what can be decommissioned, this maintenance cost will likely be lower.