End of Life (EOL) and End of Support Life (EOSL) technology assets have increased liability for outages or data loss and they are easier targets for security events Assets nearing their EOL/EOSL dates have more exposure to data security events.The cost of data loss or security breaches can be immeasurable. Replacing assets before EOL/EOSL occurs will reduce unneeded expense and exposure. Older assets have security exploits that are well known to the hacker community.Compounding this, the OEMs generally do not release security patches for EOL/EOSL assets.Further, the support contract cost for these assets is far more expensive than for newer products.The risk of data loss or a security breach could add significantly to costs.
Defined: “End of Life” (EOL) and “End of Support Life” (EOSL)
EOL – The asset is no longer available.As new products are released, OEMs will announce these older products as being EOL on a date of their choosing.Support services will often continue to be offered beyond the EOL date, but the support costs will become increasingly more expensive as the OEM shifts their support organization towards supporting their new product releases.
EOSL– Support is no longer available for the asset. Even with assets that are no longer available for purchase, OEMs generally will offer support services beyond the EOL date. The OEM chooses when EOSL will occur based on the number of trained resources available, the number of and the types of spare equipment remaining in their inventory systems and by the size of the support demand from customers. This date can be near to the EOL date, or 5 years out or even 10 years out.
Asset Life-cycle Risk Mitigation is Policy, Procedure and Tools
Tracking EOL and EOSL events allows for pre-planning of asset retirement or replacement while keeping your environment fully supported. Understanding your asset life-cycle phases will allow you to make better, more cost-effective decisions for your business. Reduce the security risk and potential data loss that is associated with older assets.
The Approach Balance these risks while sustaining the maximum ROI from your asset investment.Deliver the required service levels to your organization with less risk. To achieve this objective, IT organizations must implement policy, procedure and tools to gain the proactive ability to easily identify these assets nearing their EOL/EOSL dates well ahead of time.
Key Steps
- Define an asset management policy as a part of your IT organization’s standard procedures
- Use tools to profile each asset by how it is supported
- What is its mission/role in your environment?
- Where is it deployed, the service location?
- When does its warranty end?
- When does its support contract end?
- When does it become an EOL or EOSL liability?
- Establish a clear view into your entire IT asset inventory and retire old assets before any critical events occur
- Execute your data security measures prior to processing your end-of-life asset disposal/destruction procedures
- Administer controls to address security risks throughout the disposition process.
By managing your asset’s life-cycle and retiring them in a structured manner you can avoid unpleasant surprises.IT Partners offers our Contrax asset and support contract management services to assist you in performing these key steps.Our staff of asset management professionals will team with you in managing your assets.In addition to our portfolio of Contrax services, we also provide you a common portal with 24 x 7 x 365 availability to your asset data.The portal is your single dashboard view of all your IT assets, their support contracts and their EOL/EOSL dates.
Please contact us and ask how we can help you comprehensively manage all your IT assets with our Contrax asset and support contract management services.