Forget about our aging population, it’s time to talk about old IT devices. As Dennis McCafferty cites in a slide show for CIO Insight, these devices are now the oldest they’ve been in six years. The likely culprit: budgetary constraints that are disrupting “refresh patterns” in workplace technology adoption. Confirming this notion of aging IT are several statistics drawn from a 2014 report by Dimension Data. A brief rundown of the numbers gives a sense of the associated impacts.
- 11% – The increase in the number of access switches that support 10-gigabit uplinks.
- 12% – The increase in access switch ports that support gigabit Ethernet, up from last year.
- 14% – Is the current ratio of hardware failure, but alas, human error is still the top cause of network issues at 26%.
- 16% – is the proportion of issues that are caused by device failures, making this aspect of aging IT a relatively innocent one.
- 27% – the ratio of devices that are at the stage where vendors have started reducing support.
- 32% – the increase in software and security issues from the previous year (2013), a big jump for both bugs and vulnerabilities.
- 51% – the proportion of ports that are currently Ethernet-powered, still a slight majority.
- 51% – is the percent of all network devices that are now aging or obsolete, up from 35% in 2010.
If your organization knows all too well the challenges of managing old systems, consider someone like Computer Aid to help you with your legacy support. You can view the full slide show at: http://www.cioinsight.com/it-strategy/infrastructure/slideshows/it-networks-keep-getting-older.html/
