Retirement is the terminal stage of an application's lifecycle.  Retiring, or sunsetting an application, involves removing it from production.  Although the act of retiring an application may itself be simple, it may be related to many other activities and spawn additional projects.  The application being retired was deployed to serve a purpose.  As long as that or related purposes are still needed, they must be still be supported.  Frequently the retired application is replaced by functionality in other custom or third-party applications.  This migration from the old application to its replacements may spawn many projects and project requests including not only building or deploying new applications but also migrating data and retraining users.

Sub Activities

Retiring applications can be highly varied depending upon the application's role in the business.  Many retirements will include activities such as the following:

• Performing gap analysis of the target application against its replacement(s).
• Performing replacement projects.
• Migrating application data.
• Reconfiguring systems interfacing with the target application.
• Archiving target application and data.
• Uninstalling and removing the target application and related infrastructure.
• Repurposing impacted infrastructure.