Hornsby Shire Council on Sydney’s northern outskirts has found a ready solution to the challenge of what to do with important historical data when retiring legacy systems ahead of a move to the cloud.
While this challenge looms large with the prospect of many councils moving to the cloud, it became even more of a dilemma for Hornsby when it decided after 15 years, to move from the Councils Online Managed Service to a new solution based largely ‘in the cloud’.
But in the move to the new system Hornsby faced the question – should it convert all historical information over to the new system, or archive it?
While the first strategy implied a substantial systems conversion project, the latter raised the question of whether Council could store and access historical data, independent of an application to support that data.
And further influencing Hornsby, as many councils are now discovering, the more applications in the cloud, the higher the financial premium for data storage.
The implications for archiving were far more wide-reaching than two years earlier when it had initially deployed iFerret as a corporate search tool to quickly retrieve information from across multiple information systems.
At that time Hornsby commissioned iPlatinum to develop an archiving solution to enable querying and reporting on the Stowe TCS system from which Council had upgraded more than a decade earlier.
The success of that initial archive project dictated a strategy that has since seen iPlatinum build archives using iFerret to access Council’s Business Paper system, the Oracle eBusiness suite (finance, human resources, payroll assets and customer relations management) and the Kronos time and attendance system.
The archive development project aimed to ensure less risk of missing data, with easy, read only access.
About iArchive
The iPlatinum iArchive solution accommodates any council historical data that no longer has a place in current transaction systems. It provides the capability to query and report on historical data in legacy systems such as GenaCIS, Stowe TCS, Practical, Fujitsu, Authority, Practical, TechnologyOne, AusSoft, SynergySoft, Pathway, Oracle Financials, JDE Financials, Chris HR/Payroll, business paper systems, asset management systems, time and attendance systems, records solutions and more, without the need for a supporting
application.
The solution provides a means of handling legacy historic information and ensuring ongoing seamless access without the need to maintain or know how to navigate around redundant historical business systems.
*Copy supplied by iPlatinum
