Protect your organization from technology obsolescence risk by weeding out legacy IT components and planning ahead for when components go out-of-support in the future. Learn how SAP LeanIX tracks and monitors your IT landscape.
Technology obsolescence is an often-overlooked threat to your organization. Beyond the risks of catastrophic failure, legacy tech holds back innovation and wastes resources on unnecessary maintenance.
Yet, keeping on top of your tech debt can be challenging. How do you know when your technology is out-of-support and what kind of risk it poses?
It can be difficult to see where 'zombie' technology is slowing down your organization, even when you're already looking for tech that's out of date. It's even more challenging to determine where you're at risk from technology that won't reach end-of-life until next year, or in five years time, or ten.
The pace of technological change is always accelerating and keeping up is only going to become more difficult. You will almost need to be omniscient in order to ensure your IT landscape is safe from technology obsolescence risk.
Even a dedicated team of people cannot monitor your entire tech stack unassisted. To protect your business, you need a tool that provides a view of your whole IT landscape, reveals where you are at risk today, and gives you timeline showing when specific technologies will become a risk.
To find out how SAP LeanIX offers complete oversight of your technology obsolescence risk, download our poster:
FREE POSTER: Protect Your Organization From Technology Obsolescence Risk
The Risks Of Tech Obsolescence
"On average, 67% of an organization’s technology is made up of legacy (31%) and conventional (36%) systems. Only 33% of technology in large organizations is modernized."
More than a third of systems within the average company are outdated. That includes both technology that's no longer supported by the vendor as well as technology that's no longer able to compete with alternatives.
Guy's and St Thomas' hospital in London faced a data center outage in 2022, caused by high summer temperatures and resulting in harm to at least one patient. Restoring systems took two months due to the 371 legacy IT systems in operation within the hospital.
This is the worst-case scenario for organizations that allow their legacy technology to get out of hand. However, more common than critical failure is the unseen harm that legacy systems are doing to your company every day.
While often unaddressed, your IT teams will be well aware of the failings of the legacy systems your employees regularly struggle with. Those failings undermine productivity while your IT team wastes time dealing with avoidable issues.
Our 2023 IT Cost Optimization Survey found that 24% of IT budget is wasted on technical debt each year. Other surveys say the number is closer to 75%.
READ: Application Rationalization Key To 2023 IT Cost Optimization
More costly than any of these problems, however, may be the restraints legacy technology puts on your organization's ability to innovate. Revolutionary technology like artificial intelligence (AI) won't ever be able to reach its full potential when it's running on outdated components, if it's even compatible.
Without the ability to leverage this technology, organizations will lose their competitive edge in the market. While your competitors are leveraging best-of-breed technology, you could be left out.
However, today's best-of-breed is tomorrow's legacy. Keeping up-to-date may not be enough.
Obsolete Tech Isn't The Only Problem
Addressing technology obsolescence is a concern for the moment, but you also need to be thinking about the future. The quote above notes that, while 31% of your tech is likely obsolete, even more (36%) is merely 'conventional.'
By conventional, Avanade IT means technology that isn't legacy, but isn't cutting edge, either. Conventional technology will do for now, but it will rapidly turn into legacy technology, possibly sooner than you think.
This means that it isn't just the 31% of your technology that's obsolete that you need to be concerned about. You need to be monitoring the 67% of your technology that isn't best-of-breed.
Of course, that isn't to say that 67% of your technology isn't fit for purpose. Legacy technology can easily be 'good enough' for the task at hand, and could, in some cases, be a better functional fit for your business than a more modern alternative.
The issue is that, without clear oversight of your legacy and soon-to-be-legacy technology, you simply don't know whether you're at risk. To be safe, you need to know precisely:
- which of your IT components and software is legacy
- when currently non-legacy technology will become so soon
- what business capabilities all of the above supports and how critical they are
- the actual threat obsolete and aging technology poses to those business capabilities
This information is critical for managing your IT landscape and ensuring it can support a competitive business model. Collecting all this information in a spreadsheet stored on an obscure drive and requiring regular, manual updates is not going to be particularly helpful in this regard.
Not only do you need to gather this data continuously, you also need to store it in a single repository that can be viewed by anyone in your organization. This will ensure that you're all on the same page when it comes to tech obsolescence risk.
SAP LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance makes the creation and maintenance of such a repository possible. Let's explore the value of SAP LeanIX solutions for managing your technology, legacy or otherwise.
How SAP LeanIX Can Help
Technology obsolescence risk is a concern for every organization, and the first step towards remediating that risk is clear, comprehensive visibility into your IT landscape. To that end, SAP LeanIX serves as a single source of truth for your software application and IT component inventory.
Our Technology Radar report can help reveal where technical debt and outdated technology may be holding back innovation within your organization. The report consumes software bills of materials (SBOMs) and data from configuration management databases (CMDB) in order to map and assess your technology landscape.
Combining this with information from SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management, you can identify which of your legacy components supports mission-critical applications, and which of those applications support which business capabilities. This way, you have a business context for addressing tech obsolescence risk.
With SAP LeanIX solutions monitoring your IT landscape, you can ensure outdated technology won't catch you by surprise. Instead, you will keep your tech landscape up to date and your business thriving.
To find out how SAP LeanIX delivers a complete oversight of your technology obsolescence risk, download our poster:
