Posted on Thursday, April 20, 2017
Many organizations have failed to achieve much-needed advances in their business processes because they are held back by legacy systems. So it’s little surprise that CTOs deliberately avoid any strategy that could create “technical debt”.
“Technical debt” is used to describe enterprise system that have become out of date because of accrued unapplied updates. Where technical debt is ignored, the cost of resolving the problem escalates. Eventually the debt reaches the point of bankruptcy when the organization simply cannot afford to pay it off.
Which is when you are left with a true legacy system, stuck in the past and almost impossible to upgrade.
A new report published by Computer Economics, Avoiding Technical Bankruptcy in Legacy Systems, suggests that 20 percent of businesses are currently flirting with technical bankruptcy – which could have serious repercussions for their long-term future.
Where does post-warranty fit into the technical debt landscape?
Obviously this is a concern for the CTO – how long can hardware assets be retained before the business begins to accrue technical debt?
With the move to a heterogeneous, software-defined data center however, these worries are effectively negated. Take software defined storage (SDS) for instance – because storage is virtualized, the underlying hardware is of little consequence. This allows the CTO to deploy hardware of virtually any age, from any vendor, as part of their storage fabric.
As your data center becomes more virtualized, the risk of technical debt (at least at the hardware level) lessens, even when using post-warranty storage arrays – no matter what your vendor says. All you need is a competent, well-resourced third party maintenance provider to help keep these systems up and running.
Next steps
To learn more about avoiding technical bankruptcy and increasing the ROI of your storage assets, please get in touch.
– See more at: https://www.cds.net/blog/2017/04/third-party-maintenance-and-technical-bankruptcy/#sthash.590MIig5.dpuf