We have all been there, that one piece of equipment thats a discoloured beige or software that looks like it was designed in the 90’s that you have had to support for much longer than the product was intended.
More often than not this relic as I will refer to it still exists because either the budget for upgrading / replacing simply doesn’t exist or is out of reach. It could be that other systems have been built around it therefore it’s supporting your house of cards and is months / years of work to deploy a replacement solution.
Either way relics are a serious risk to any business, they could fail at any time and replacement hardware is simply not available or the company the wrote the software no longer supports it or even worse is no longer in business.
I’ve been in this predicament myself with some finance software that was only support by an elderly lady who then retired leaving no further support options, the software itself was prehistoric.
So how do you manage these relics?
#1 Backups are important and not just backing up the data in the case of but a clone of the entire system if possible
#2 Have a plan in case the proverbial hits the fan, because you know that when it does fail that the pressure is going to be on YOU to fix it.
#3 Push for a new solution, most likely you have a relic because someone has said replacing it is to expensive or to hard, cover your bases and make sure that management is well aware the risk that your relic is creating.
#4 Try to avoid being in this situation where possible, long term planning and having replacement cycles will help on the hardware side of things. With software review their use every few years and follow upgrade paths as often as possible,
Most businesses will have a relic just make sure yours was installed sometime AD and not BC.
No responses yet