Applications that are candidates for retirement consume computing resources, storage, and manpower to maintain yet provide very little business benefit to the organization. Often, applications that support hundreds of users at rollout are later used by very few.  While the majority of IT budgets support existing applications, very little attention is typically paid to the total cost of maintaining an application.

Application retirement is a viable strategy for eliminating redundant legacy applications, thereby improving operational efficiency and reducing costs.  By reducing the number of applications within the IT infrastructure, DBAs can concentrate on maintaining critical business applications with the highest value to the organization instead of compiling data from disparate sources.