End-Of-Life Hardware – Retire or Not Retire?

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Many IT departments have processes to keep costs under control and systems running smoothly. However, most organizations fail to adequately plan and properly manage the end-of-life (EOL) transition for routers, firewalls, switches and other critical network infrastructure. A device that is fully depreciated does not yield cost savings – these devices actually represent potentially higher costs due to non-compliance, chance of failure and lack of adequate support.

There are many reasons why organizations do not proactively manage EOL network assets. Two of the most common reasons include:

  1. Reluctance to spend money and time on something that is working
  2. Insufficient resources to prioritize the task of managing network assets

However, underlying risks and costs exist if you do not establish and follow a well-defined process to transition EOL devices out of your network.  Operating legacy hardware poses a significant risk and higher operating cost due to the following reasons:

  • Regulatory non-compliance
  • Excessive support costs
  • Decreased productivity
  • Business disruption

Regulatory Non-compliance:  Non-conformance costs will become an issue if the device is unable to achieve control objectives defined by your policies. This may be due to a lack of technical capability or because the device is no longer able to receive updates that address security vulnerabilities.

Excessive Support Costs:  The primary reason for increasing support costs are due to vendor end-of-sale and EOL policies. As a device approaches EOL, the support services can become more expensive. Failure to secure or renew a maintenance agreement before critical EOL dates expire will prevent you from receiving vendor technical support and maintenance upgrades. Therefore you may be forced to develop or maintain more expensive in-house skills or contract externally for those needed services.

Decreased Productivity:  IT technology is a significant business productivity driver. Therefore when new IT technologies are not adopted and utilized, then opportunity costs may negatively affect bottom-line financial performance. This is also a problem when the organization wants to expand service only to discover that the underlying infrastructure won’t support the business requirements because it is no longer supported. This discovery then forces unplanned expenditures and cost overruns.

Business Disruption:  This risk often produces a broad spectrum of affects caused by catastrophic device failure and often leads to business disruption and accompanying lost revenue and/or brand damage. These problems are amplified when remediating a legacy device consumes even more time because spares cannot be located or the replacement device requires extensive install and configuration effort.

Tracking EOL devices can be difficult because of the challenge to effectively manage, track and verify the information.

  • There is no pattern for how long a vendor will keep a product in market or when they will issue an EOL announcement.  Therefore, you simply can’t perform this research annually (without the likelihood of missing several announcements throughout the year). Vendors make it your responsibility to watch for these announcements. If you miss any announcement then you will miss out on important transition dates and options.
  • Vendors often communicate end-of-sales/end-of-life announcements according to a product series as opposed to a specific model or part number. Therefore an EOL announcement may, or may not, apply to your specific device.  Tracking EOL dates takes time because you have to carefully read each applicable announcement and determine how it applies to your equipment.
  • It is very important to have an accurate inventory of your devices, including serial numbers, part numbers, etc.
  • All of this data has to be well integrated with management, and if it’s not part of your network management system, it will require more effort to properly manage all of this data.

If you don’t have an internal system for tracking this information, your managed service provider should be tracking this for you.  Any organization running EOL technology faces many unknown and potentially costly challenges. It’s important to work with a firm that has vast experience and expertise in helping organizations transition to newer technology.

Rely on Bryley Systems as your trusted partner to assist your organization properly phase out EOL technology and adopt new technologies, so that your IT functions are operating at its maximum potential.  Contact us at 978-562-6077, or by email at ITExperts@Bryley.com to learn more. We are here to help.