The Need for Custom Built Archive Applications
For organizations that have realized the benefits of retiring old applications and archiving their data, a new challenge has arisen: maintaining access to archived data after the legacy application is decommissioned.
Let’s unpack the challenges of data archival and the benefits of custom-built archive applications, and how Archon™ brings it all together.
Methods to Access Archived Data
Once data is archived, it is typically archived through one of the modalities shown below. Any legacy data archive solution needs to support the archiving of all legacy data through each of the following approaches.
- Search Screens – User screens for businesses to login and view data through searches.
- JDBC Driver – Analytics and reporting tools use these drivers to pull data.
- API – API calls are made by applications to pull data.
- SQL Queries – DB analysts use queries to pull data for their analyses.
- Custom Access – This will be detailed in sections below.
Why do we need Custom Access and Custom-Built Archive Applications?
The need for custom built archive applications is primarily centered around two scenarios:
1. Custom formatted reports
Custom formatted reports are typically created for applications that run transactional types of data such as invoices, monthly statements, and reports. These reports hold value for customer service, audits, and other business needs. They often have specific formatting and view requirements, and sometimes require their exact original fidelity.
These reports are created as PDF, images, or Rich Text before the application is archived and then stored along with metadata for easy search and retrieval. This process can cause a huge bloat in data size during archival.
The other option is to use an archive solution to recreate the same report at run time without spending too much time in development.
2. Data pulled across multiple tables, databases or applications
Custom solutions are required when data is pulled across multiple applications or databases, and when data is outside the archive or is housed between multiple schemas or storages.
How does Platform 3 Solutions help with this problem?
Platform 3 Solutions helps organizations archive and manage their legacy content from any legacy system. Platform 3’s unique solution allows organizations to search and retrieve content on-demand as they would with their live application.
Customer Success Story with Archon™
A client wants to continue usage of end-user statement requests from the archive like they traditionally do with their live system.
In addition to the report extraction, they required an option to password-protect the generated statement, considering the data sensitivity of the report.
Archive repositories have their own constraints in terms of features and functions, and Archon™ custom integration provides a way to build any features on top of the archive.
What are the Challenges in Retrieving Reports?
Challenge 1: Retrieving reports from an Archive
Often times, clients need to retrieve multiple statements as reports, and pre-process the reports as statements, before delivering to the end-user.
The challenge is that most archives will not allow for any pre- or post-processing of data, such as combining different Archive data together for a specific view or use case citing “compliance violations” for “modifying the data”. Archon™ provides the flexibility for both compliance and unique data views.
Challenge 2: Password protected reports
Functional use cases, like password protecting the file after generating the report, is not possible in all archive repositories.
Providing functionality for customizations and features when retrieving data from any Archive is a key feature of Archon™.
Challenge 3: Automating a solution of up- and down-stream integrations and business logic
A custom integration should automate, and provide seamless interaction with, both ingestion and retrieval from an archive. Taking care of audit logging and error reporting and maintaining integrity of each incoming request, enabling ease of maintenance and compliance reporting.
Archon™ provides a proven methodology to apply business rules and functions ‘end-to-end’ when archiving and accessing data.
The Solution
Platform 3 Solutions’ Archon™ provides a foundation of custom integrations and business logic with legacy and production application to manage the lifecycle of your data. Archon™ grants the unique ability to build business rules and functions to interact with data in a compliant fashion.
Throughout this process, Archon™ maintains proper error reporting and audit logging to guarantee easy interaction and data integrity between multiple parties. Many types of customization and business rules are possible with Archon™, without the typical compliance constraints and inflexibility of a traditional archive.
Contact Platform 3 Solutions today to learn more and to Leave Your Legacy™.
