United Kingdom

    Enterprise Data Migration & Legacy System Retirement for UK Organisations

    Migrate the Data. Retire the Legacy. Keep the History.

    SyntraETL helps UK organisations migrate from legacy ERP, HCM and workforce applications while preserving secure, searchable and compliant access to historical records — so the old system can actually be switched off.

    UK Public SectorSyntraETL data migration, archival and legacy application retirement services are available to UK public-sector buyers through the G-Cloud 15 framework.Explore G-Cloud 15 services →

    Buying through UK public-sector frameworks

    Firstcron Services UK Ltd is registered on G-Cloud 15, so NHS bodies, local authorities, universities and central government departments can engage SyntraETL for data migration, archival, reconciliation and legacy application retirement under an existing framework agreement rather than running a separate procurement.

    What is bought

    Cloud Support services

    Migration, archival, reconciliation and decommissioning delivered as defined-scope work packages against agreed outcomes.

    How it is bought

    Framework agreement in place

    Call-off under existing framework terms rather than a new OJEU-style procurement exercise for each engagement.

    Who you contract with

    UK contracting entity

    Engagements are contracted through Firstcron Services UK Ltd, the UK entity, with delivery by the SyntraETL team.

    The problems this solves

    Most UK organisations replacing an ERP or HCM platform reach the same point: the new system is live, but the old one is still running — still licensed, still hosted, still patched, still audited — because a small number of people occasionally need something out of it.

    The migration only moved what the new system needs

    Open balances, active suppliers and current employees go across. Closed periods, leavers, historical payroll and eight years of attachments do not fit the target data model and stay behind.

    Users still need the history

    Finance needs prior-year comparatives. HR needs leaver records. Payroll answers queries going back years. Auditors, FOI officers and DSAR teams need evidence on demand.

    So the legacy application keeps running

    Licence, hosting, database, backup, DR, patching, DBA time and an ageing security surface — all retained to serve a handful of look-up requests a month.

    Nobody can prove the archive is complete

    Without source-to-target reconciliation, an information asset owner cannot sign off switching the application off, so the decision is deferred another year.

    Retention obligations are not the same as keeping the app

    A retention schedule requires the record to remain available and disposable on schedule. It does not require the original application to remain live.

    The saving is real but unclaimed

    Licence, infrastructure and support costs continue to be paid against a system that has already been functionally replaced.

    Data migration

    SyntraETL moves the data that the new application needs, in controlled and repeatable cycles. Extraction, mapping, transformation, validation, load and reconciliation are run end to end more than once before anything touches production, so mapping and data-quality corrections are found in rehearsal rather than at cutover.

    Legacy sourceDataMoveTransform & validateTarget applicationDataVault reconciliationDataLens
    1. 1Discovery and scopeWhich objects, which modules, how many years, what volume of attachments, and which records must be retained rather than migrated.
    2. 2MappingA source-to-target workbook carries every field in scope through its transformation rule to the target object and field, approved with the business before production.
    3. 3Rehearsal cyclesFull extract, transform, load and reconcile runs that surface corrections early and prove production readiness.
    4. 4CutoverFinal extract, data freeze, load, reconciliation, business validation and sign-off.

    Legacy system retirement

    Everything the new application does not take is preserved instead of abandoned. Once the history is archived, reconciled and accessible, the legacy application has no remaining reason to run.

    Legacy applicationStill licensed, hosted, patched and supported — often only because users need occasional access to history
    DataMoveExtract structured data, attachments, documents and audit history
    DataVaultPreserve the history securely, with retention and lineage
    DataLensSearch, report and export historical records under role-based access
    Legacy application retiredLicences, hosting, infrastructure and support withdrawn

    Historical data access

    Archiving is only half the problem. The reason legacy systems survive is access, so DataLens gives named users a way to find a record without an IT request and without the source application.

    Search and retrieve

    Find an invoice, a payslip, a purchase order, an employee record or a document by the identifiers people actually use.

    Report and export

    Run historical reports and export results for audit, FOI, DSAR and legal responses in a defensible format.

    Role-based access control

    Access is scoped by role and integrated with your identity provider through SSO, so historical HR and payroll data stays restricted.

    Access audit trail

    Every search, view and export is logged, which is usually stricter control than the legacy application offered.

    Attachments and documents

    Scanned invoices, contracts, correspondence and supporting documents are archived with the transaction they belong to, not separately.

    Relationships preserved

    A record arrives with its context — an invoice with its supplier, purchase order, approvals and attachments — rather than as an isolated table extract.

    Reconciliation and migration assurance

    An archive nobody can prove is complete does not let anyone switch anything off. Every migration and archival cycle produces source counts, transformed counts, rejected records, target counts and control totals, categorised so that discrepancies are explained rather than discovered later.

    Source-to-target reconciliationReconciled
    Source records identified14,829,321
    Records archived14,829,321
    Rejected / exception records0
    Reconciled100%

    Illustrative figures shown to explain how reconciliation evidence is presented. They are not drawn from a specific customer engagement.

    Supported platforms

    SyntraETL reads from and writes to the enterprise applications UK organisations are actually leaving and actually moving to, plus the bespoke Oracle and SQL Server databases that accumulate around them.

    UK compliance and information governance

    Retirement decisions are made by information asset owners, not by IT alone. The archive is designed so that the obligations which currently justify keeping the legacy system are met by the archive instead.

    UK GDPRData Protection Act 2018Freedom of Information Act 2000DSAR handlingRetention schedulesLegal holdEvidenced disposalAccess audit trail
    Retention schedulesRecords are archived against a retention period so that disposal happens on schedule rather than never.
    Legal holdRecords under hold are exempt from scheduled disposal until the hold is released.
    FOI and DSARHistorical records remain searchable and exportable so statutory deadlines can be met without reviving a decommissioned system.
    Evidenced disposalWhen a retention period expires, disposal is recorded, so the organisation can evidence what was destroyed and when.
    Access control and auditRole-based access through your identity provider, with every access logged.
    Data residencyArchive location is agreed as part of the architecture to meet UK data-residency requirements.

    SyntraETL provides the technical capability to meet these obligations. It does not provide legal advice, and retention decisions remain the organisation's own.

    What retirement is worth

    A single mid-sized legacy ERP or HCM application typically carries licence or support renewal, hosting, database and storage, backup and disaster recovery, patching, security remediation and a share of DBA and application-support time. The archive that replaces it carries none of those.

    Current annual cost of running the legacy application£180,000 / year
    One-off Legacy Exit implementation£75,000 one-off
    Ongoing annual archive and support cost£20,000 / year

    Illustrative example. Actual savings depend on the system, contract terms, infrastructure, support model, retention requirements and implementation scope. Estimated three-year saving in this example: approximately £405,000.

    Buying in the public sector

    NHS bodies, local authorities, universities and central government departments can engage SyntraETL under an existing framework agreement rather than running a separate procurement. The G-Cloud page sets out what can actually be bought, the engagement models available and the buyer questions that come up most often.

    UK Public SectorSyntraETL data migration, archival and legacy application retirement services are available to UK public-sector buyers through the G-Cloud 15 framework.

    Start with the evidence, not the pitch

    A Legacy Exit Assessment establishes what is actually in the legacy estate, what has to be retained, what it currently costs to keep running and what retiring it would be worth — before any implementation is committed.