Why End of Life for Assets Matters
IT Asset End of Life, also known as the IT Asset Product Lifecycle, is a critical component to managing the IT estate and associated risk vectors. Visibility into the asset lifecycle is a fundamental and crucial enterprise requirement, is contingent on both visibility into the assets themselves, and having available data intelligence specific to the lifecycle of these assets and underlying/supporting data points.
As most will be aware, attaining a complete level of visibility into the assets is no small task, and maintaining respectable coverage across the entire IT estate over time arguably even more challenging.
These assets are deployed to generate organizational performance and value specific to their mapped services, thus at a high level, we can derive two key dimensions in measuring the assets and underatanding why lifecycle management is so important.
a) Organizational performance contibution (value created, risk generated as a by-product)
b) Cost (such as resourcing, time, complexity, managability, financial et. al.)
The asset lifecycle, which is both unique to the product and is defined differently by each vendor, has variable implications to these two dimensions, generating risk, creating blind IT spots and complexity, degrading business performance, and causing keystone impacts which are unexpected, unanticipated, and perhaps worst of all, unplanned.
At Enstarla, we leverage a model containing three core vectors which we've coined the End of Life Impact Vectors:
a) Compatability
b) Supportability
c) Vulnerability
Nuances
Managing End of Life well really comes down to a single fundamental, having the required data intelligence at hand in order to make strong decisions.
These data points translate into decision making capability for actioning real world problems such as assessing and tracking initial and ongoing legacy risk, planning and logistics for enterprise transformational initatives, data required for cyber teams to understand vulnerabilities, and for the organization as a whole to understand wide ranging compliance issues.
Breaking Down the Three Main End of Life Impact Vectors
Compatability
Software and Hardware Assets are closely interconnected and have many interdependencies. Assets that cannot be upgraded, modified or configured to meet the ongoing fluid nature of IT requirements inevitably hold back progress, diluting investments.
Supportability
Systems that are complex to maintain, manage and operate have a net cost across the organization. When it is harder and more complicated to support IT assets there is more chance of break/fix events occuring and a longer list of known issues and problem management cases to curate. Financial impacts are also included in this vector such as licensing and contracting costs, additional support costs and so on.
Vulnerability
As products become older, newer products get the lions share of developer's budget and focus. Once obsolete, it is unlikely that you can patch vulnerabilities at all, not to mention features and functions being released that provide benefits to the security of the assets and those that surround them, and address ongoing trends.
Real World Examples Where End of Life Intelligence Can Matter Most:
1) Loss of ISO Accreditation
2) HIPAA infringement
3) Cyber Incidents
4) Digital Transformation Enablement
5) CMDB Maturity
6) Legacy Risk Management
7) Software Vendor Audit
8) Project Roadmaps
Leveraging The Intelligence
Leveraging the intelligence allows key questions to be asked of your environment, allowing decisions to be made to combat a range of issues, such as lowering risks and reducing costs.
Key Questions to ask and to ratify across the three impact vectors:
What is the net impact from obsolete products today?
What products do i have becoming obsolete in the next 18 months?
What products in my respective environments can no longer be patched and what subset of that population has open security vulnerabilities?
What inflight or approaching enterprise projects and programs can use improved legacy intelligence to make them more succesful?
Are there regulatory or compliance areas that are impacted by current state legacy risk?
What are my challenges today stemming from compatability challenges and is this limiting business performance?
Next Steps:
For next steps, Enstarla strongly recommends procurement of a solution such as Flexera's Data Platform, or engaging with Enstarla for our End Of Life Intelligence Consulting Service. Reach out to Enstarla with any questions on Linkedin or by emailing info@Enstarla.com.
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