End-of-Life Support: Continuing Channel Opportunity

A fact of life in business is that as new technologies and products are launched, mature products are phased out. End-of-life or end-of-support announcements often prompt businesses to review their at-risk devices operating on the network, but this doesn't always happen. Based on an analysis by Softchoice of more than 212,000 Cisco networking devices at 350 organizations in North America, 73 percent of businesses have end-of-support devices operating in their networks. These devices can increase a company's risk of security breaches and network outages as well as result in higher future replacements costs. In addition, nearly all the businesses had end-of-sale devices on their networks that are no longer sold by the vendor but still supported. While the analysis finds the number of at-risk devices is declining, the number of businesses that have them is rising. "The misconception is that fewer at-risk devices make an organization less vulnerable, but it only takes one to bring down an entire network," said David Vigna, Cisco practice director at Softchoice, an IT solution and managed service provider. The results show opportunities for solution providers to help customers address the health of their network infrastructure.