Life Cycle Archives - EasySAM

Legacy IT: A technical debt field of dreams

Mike Varney — Tue, 30 May 2023 08:58:13 +0000

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The IT industry is always looking to the future and the release of the next big thing, but it can come at a cost to ageing infrastructure.

Published on 30th May 2023

In Field of Dreams, while walking in his cornfield, Kevin Costner’s character hears a whisper: “If you build it, he will come,” which, without giving the plot away, inspires him to build a baseball field.

In IT, if you build it, they – the users – will indeed come, that is, until something better comes along. Then it becomes a noose around your neck.

IT leaders are forever dealing with legacy systems and it is hard to find an IT leader who will have thought out well in advance, how the technical debt introduced during his or her tenure, will be maintained in years to come, when the next CIO is in charge.

And as Martin Biggs, managing director of EMEA at third-party support firm Spinnaker, points out, the enterprise software providers want their customers to upgrade on-premises legacy systems to new cloud-based offerings. More often than not, legacy systems that require updating or a security patch, may remain unpatched for months.

The IT sector doesn’t really like to consider the problem of technical debt. Every IT conference and product pitch is about the next greatest piece of tech innovation. It is a question Computer Weekly put to Alex Case, the public sector industry principal for the EMEA region at Pegasystems.

Fixing legacy IT in the public sector

In light of the recent Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report looking into the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) legacy IT systems, Case, who has worked extensively in the public sector, believes low code tooling can help to overcome the bottlenecks of the vertically integrated monolithic IT systems that run the business workflows in government departments.

As reported by the PAC, Defra has a legacy IT problem and it is not alone. The PAC’s Tackling Defra’s ageing digital services report has profound implications across government departments. Government digital services often rely on outdated and unsupported legacy IT systems. “We concluded that there was no clear plan to replace or modernise legacy systems and data that were critical to service provision but were often old, unsupportable, vulnerable and a constraint on transformation,” the PAC warned in the report.

Case and other supporters of low-code tooling, believe that the best way forward is to look at the inefficiencies in the workflow and join the broken bits via a low code platform. This makes sense in the short to medium term, as it offers a way to build efficiencies which workaround legacy IT system. But such a strategy ultimately leads to data silos and low-code application sprawl. Isn’t it time the industry recognises the problem that is now brewing?

Source

https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Cliff-Sarans-Enterprise-blog/Legacy-IT-A-technical-debt-field-of-dreams

Image Credit

Pixabay via Pexels

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Six reasons why the software life cycle management matters

Mike Varney — Fri, 26 May 2023 15:19:00 +0000

Life Cycle

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Life Cycle

Software asset management can be a headache and a well crafted software life cycle management strategy is the go to solution.

Published on 26th May 2023

Good management of your organisation’s software life cycle has always been important. After all, your software must meet the needs of your enterprise users and function as intended. Once you’ve chosen the right software, keeping up to date with the latest technologies, best practices, features and functionalities can greatly improve efficiency and productivity across your organisation.

Managing the software life cycle can help you mitigate financial and compliance risk and save costs, as you can identify and eliminate unnecessary or underused features or licences.

You may find you don’t really understand the software licences you have, that you’ve struck the wrong deal or that you are paying something you don’t need. Overspending on software and running into expensive vendor audits are just two of the possible consequences.

Efficient software life cycle management can be a headache for any organisation. Software products lack common standards and keeping an accurate software inventory can be time-consuming and still not provide the visibility your organisation needs to manage licences or negotiate software contracts. But it’s worth investing in – and here’s why.

Six reasons to pay attention to software life cycle management

It can reduce complexity

Software licensing is complex, but it’s important to get to grips with it if your organisation – like so many others – has a complicated estate.

You may have swathes of licences expiring in one location, different versions of software used in another location, unused licences, overuse and many other scenarios. There may be multiple vendors involved, with a range of licence types.

What’s more, your software products may be different life cycles with varying expiry dates. Licences for your gateway hardware, like switches or routers, might even apply to other hardware too.

A software life cycle management strategy for both the short and the long term will take all of the above into account. It will help you reduce licensing complexity and increase visibility and control so you can manage your licensing efficiently.

It can protect you against compliance-related risks

Compliance isn’t just about meeting vendor requirements or paying your licence renewals on time. This is important, but so is internal compliance.

If you don’t have proper version control or don’t know your expiry dates, you may be relying on software that’s nearing end of life or is no longer supported.

Let’s say you believe all your switches are working on version four, but it turns out some are still on version three. This means the next upgrade might not work properly. This oversight can have serious consequence for the performance of your software – and your organisation.

This scenario can leave you exposed to two kinds of risk. The first is operational: when you have something that’s not supported or is end of life, your business continuity could be affected by a lack of network availability, for example. The second risk relates to the potential for security vulnerabilities that could leave your network compromised.

It can also limit your financial risk

Of course, there is the matter of keeping on top of your licence fees. You can face large financial penalties if you don’t renew in time.

What’s more, if you’ve been using unlicensed software and want to get back on a clean slate with your vendor, they may impose additional penalties before they will let you renew the licence.

It gives you room to focus on your business

Trying to keep up with your contracts and their ever-changing statuses can mean a lot of effort expended on negotiations and chasing up items.

You may have a batch of 50 licences expiring in one part of your organisation, then panic because you discover another 250 expiring licences elsewhere and no budget to remedy the situation. So, you might confer with the vendor to reach some kind of compromise.

And sure, the negotiations may benefit you, but is sorting out licences the best way to spend your time?

It’s all too easy to end up almost permanently involved in a never-ending cycle of unproductive licence management – and things will inevitably fall through the cracks, leaving you noncompliant. This can be avoided through proper software life cycle management.

It can help you consolidate licences

A central part of effective software life cycle management is the use of licensing agreements and enterprise agreements. These consolidate many licences into one or more contracts. Your organisation can then buy a number of licences in a block, which means all licences will expire at the same time.

Working in blocks means you don’t have to deal with individual licences. It leaves you with less to manage. That’s a big benefit for organisations, although a possible challenge is that some of these agreements are easier to scale up than down.

You should also understand vendor usage principles such as Cisco’s True Forward, which is based on volume agreements. The volume contract will change yearly, depending on what you’ve used. You won’t be charged for past use if you go beyond what’s set out in your contract, but you will be billed for that discrepancy in your next contract. So, it’s important to settle on an agreement of the right size for your organisation to get a return on investment.

It gives you visibility and control

Within a software asset management environment, you can get total visibility and control of all these moving parts, from the number of licences you have to where they are and when they’ll expire.

These insights and analytics can save you a huge amount of time, help you get licence expenses under control once and for all and ensure you’re compliant.

Source

https://www.itweb.co.za/content/kLgB1MezN3Wq59N4

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ready made via Pexels

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