Risk of NOT updating your hardware

I will start this post, by knowing we all want to have our cake and eat it, including the cherry on the top! And whilst this might make us sick, if we do the same with the computer hardware in our business, it may even cost us our businesses.

All hardware has a lifespan, this is measured by something called ‘Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)’ This is the time that any given hardware component may fail at. And this has improved over the years, but even so if you have your business running on a server do you want to risk losing this?

So how long is sensible

When we scope a server, we suggest this is replaced every 5 years, this is based on the MTBF above, but also we scope the growth of the data your business will generate in the 5 years. This will also make sure that your server operating system remains within the support phase by the vendor. We recommend this is never pushed out, because if the server does die, you will be facing a bigger bill to get it back up and working properly and that is if you have a full back up. It is likely that you won’t have access to this for several days!

So just how much would you lose over those couple of days, £5,000, £10,000 more? Is it worth the risk?

Desktops & Laptops

You might have more lee-way with these, if a single computer goes down at least others can work, so the loss might not be as bad. Here at Limbtec the tec’s laptops are looked as disposalable, they are used on site, and you never know when something weird may happen, that was something we decided on many years ago, this may not be for you, but it does suit how we use them.

And that is the important part, is looking at how you will use them, and how long you expect them to last

The business part of this

Your accountant will want to write all this down over 3 years, as mentioned above our laptops issued to tec’s are treated a disposable, so they aren’t written down over any period of time, they are just an expense. our desktops, and other network equipment will be over 3 years, our server are also over 3 years, but potentionally you could say 5 years, specially if you purchase them on a lease!

Then you have compliance

Then you have complaince, and by this in the UK this is mainly GDPR, which states all software needs to be supported this isn’t just the operating system, but also the firmware and any software running on the server.