Technology obsolescence risk management can unlock superior IT performance for your organization by locating and replacing the legacy IT components that are letting you down. Become a hero to your organization by optimizing your essential technology.
Technology obsolescence risk management is your new secret strategy for optimizing your IT landscape. Enterprise architects tend to focus on software applications and forget about technology obsolescence, but for innovative applications to reach their potential, they can't be left running on antiquated IT components.
Our 2023 IT Cost Optimization survey found that 24% of our customers' IT budget is wasted on technical debt each year. Surveys of non-LeanIX customers placed this closer to 75%.
Surfacing the out-of-support components in your IT landscape can reveal the inefficiencies that are draining the performance and investment out of your organization. You can then immediately boost your IT capabilities and cut your costs by plugging those leaks.
The person who identifies which of your IT components are outdated and how much you can gain by replacing them will be a hero to your leadership team. To unlock that technology obsolescence risk management capability, you need the LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance product.
To find out more about how LeanIX supports technology obsolescence risk management, download our free poster:
FREE POSTER: Protect Your Organization From Technology Obsolescence Risk
Obsolete IT Components Are A Supervillain
From servers that can no longer cope with your workload to operating systems that haven't been supported by their vendors in years, there are a variety of potential points of weakness in any long-standing IT infrastructure. These points can offer a scale of problems from inefficiency to outright failure.
Keeping obsolete IT components going is a constant battle for your IT team, taking up both their time and their budget. Eventually that battle will be lost and you'll face a critical failure.
In November, 2015, the busy Paris-Orly airport was forced to shut down for several hours due to a massive technology failure. Air traffic controller unions explained to the press that the failure had been caused by a 23-year-old Windows 3.1 operating system that was still a major part of the airport's IT landscape.
Yet, this isn't the only risk that seemingly innocuous pieces of hardware can pose. Legacy technology is just as much of a disadvantage to your cyber security as to the efficiency of your IT landscape.
In 2022, news website CyberNews.Com hacked 28,000 unsecured enterprise printers to print out instructions on how to secure IT components. The news website did this to raise awareness of the cyber security risks obsolete technology can create.
Generally, IT teams are focused on application modernization in order to take advantage of innovative technologies like the cloud or generative artificial intelligence. Yet, with obsolete technology eating up to 75% of IT budgets, large amounts of the time of IT specialists, and also posing a cyber security risk, we need to pay more attention to our hardware.
To deal with this, we need to adopt the emerging field of technology obsolescence risk management. This discipline will allow us to power our software innovations with the hardware they need to achieve their potential.
Gain X-Ray Vision On Tech Obsolescence Risk
The primary function of technology obsolescence risk management is to identify the obsolete IT components that are operating in your tech stack. Whether due to their being part of your IT landscape's back-end functionality or simply because they are no longer needed, these components often fall outside of supervision and continue to operate in perpetuity without being noticed.
Therefore, the first task of the technology obsolescence risk manager is to find these 'zombie' components that are continuing to function after they should have expired. Sometimes, however, this is more difficult than it sounds.
Some crucial applications are reliant on obsolete components and replacing them could cripple mission-critical operations. Others are simply so integrated into your infrastructure that removing them is a gargantuan task, the efforts required outweighing the benefits.
The key here is to understand in depth what is involved in replacing an obsolete IT component, both in terms of effort and cost. You can then weigh the investment against the benefits of replacement and present a valid business case to your leadership.
Imagine pro-actively going to your board with a list of all the obsolete components in your organization, what they support, how likely they are to fail, and how much they would cost to replace. You can then make your recommendations for which items to retire, which to monitor, and which can be safely tolerated.
Technology obsolescence management is a prime opportunity for a small number of people to drive a tremendous benefit for their entire organization. The key here is to have the right tools.
How LeanIX Gives You Superpowers
The LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance product pulls in all the information from your configuration management database (CMDB) with an out-of-the-box ServiceNow integration. It will then compare your IT components to its built-in Lifecycle Catalog to surface where your components are in their lifecycle, highlighting those that are currently out-of-support and those that will be soon.
Linking our Technology Risk and Compliance solution with our Application Portfolio Management and Architecture and Road Map Planning products, you can gain deep insight into the process of replacing those components. Understand how components fit into your infrastructure to plan out how to surgically remove those that are due for retirement, as well as how replacing them will impact your landscape in the future.
Become the hero your organization needs by offering them complete oversight of your technology obsolescence risk from a single dashboard and generate instant value and impact on your IT performance. It's like having X-ray vision.
To find out more about how the LeanIX solution can give you the power to optimize your IT landscape, download our free poster:
