Sponsorship
This comprehensive risk mitigation and management protocol consists of three major components: 1) a proven approach, 2) a set of proprietary tools, and 3) IT specialists dedicated to this body of work.
Our client, for this case, is a very large customer of Microsoft who estimated that they had over 65,000 (that’s sixty-five-thousand) MS Access databases located across their network within North America residing in 2600 locations on a network consisting of 25 terabytes of data, mixed in with over 12.5 million other files. The client was preparing for an enterprise-wide migration to Office 365 when they realized that regional divisions had operational dependencies on MS Access database applications developed by shadow IT groups dating back before the millennium and still in use today.
In a joint effort with the client’s IT group, Help4Access configured its tools to perform a series of network sweeps followed by progressively deeper analytical passes, resulting in a comprehensive list of IT assets where further analysis and what-if scenarios could be run. The MS Access asset report aids in the initial outreach conversations with key business stakeholders and acts as a repository to help track each asset’s business function and impact to the organization. (Stage 4 & 5).
Background
The Microsoft Access database application platform is the world’s fastest rapid application development platform on the planet, having been installed on over 1.3 billion computers since its initial release in 1992. Business leaders and IT professionals have used it to create simple to complex custom database applications solving critical business needs.
MS Access is a natural extension of MS Excel, and when Excel limits are reached, MS Access is the next logical tool of choice. The proliferation of MS Access database applications grows within an organization whenever there is a gap in available commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software solutions and business needs. Yet, this is the heart of business innovation and where new products and services are invented and new markets and profit streams initially developed.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and MS Access is the fastest tool to construct a solution.
MS Access often comes pre-installed on a new employee’s PC and resides within the Microsoft Office Professional suite of products. Today, every Office 365 edition includes MS Access. In its simplest state, a single Microsoft Access application may consist of a single physical file. This single physical file may contain two logical layers; a front-end or user interface, and back-end or the database portion of the application.
The front-end application may consist of one or more forms used for data entry and may also contain custom reports. Within the database portion of the single physical file, there may exist one or more tables which 1) contain data (i.e., traditional client/server), 2) link to other MS Access database applications, text files, and excel files or other heterogeneous data sources such as SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, Teradata, DB2, Salesforce and more.
Risks
MS Access database applications often start their life outside of formal IT departments and governance processes and are not tracked as formal IT assets. These applications don’t have official IT budgets nor is their business function documented within enterprise asset management portfolios. This lack of asset tracking and the growing dependency on these evolving business applications, leads to a hard to detect but nonetheless growing risk to business operations upon application failure.
Network errors, user mistakes, employee mishandling of rules and applications, out of date software, data corruptions, legacy code, viruses, malicious user behavior all threaten to jeopardize these vulnerable yet critical business solutions supporting a growing critical business function.
Microsoft Access versions prior to 2010 are no longer supported and are technically considered legacy applications.
