Nowadays, everybody seems to be going back to the future. Reboots of classic TV series and vintage clothing is all the rage. I can even say from first hand experience that Film Photography is making a huge comeback.
While this may be fine in your personal life, using old and/or obsolete software in your business is asking for trouble. Many of today’s malicious hacks rely upon people forgetting to update and patch their existing infrastructure. Servers, usually running in auto-pilot mode, are often forgotten when it comes time to keep things fresh.
You expose your company to several real risks by not regularly performing a refresh cycle. Ignoring the ever obvious Ransomware/Malware vulnerabilities in older packages, you could face incompatibilities between your software and the most recent patches to the operating systems or between your system and the other integration points. Additionally, you can also face issues if you’ve waited too long when you finally are forced to upgrade. Minor upgrades (from version 1.3 to 1.4) are usually painless affairs; major upgrades (from version 1.3 to 4.1) can be much more traumatic and can lead to client-facing outages.
Nobody likes to budget time and money for upgrades. There’s usually very little glitz and glamour in bringing background processes to current day spec. Your company may not verbally thank you for keeping an eye on their critical systems, but their financial bottom-line will be grateful that you stopped using that old floppy-disk based package and reduced their chances of having an avoidable disruption to service.
If you discover that you’re running an older version of Ivanti’s software, contact Dataseti and we can help you upgrade to the latest version as quickly and painlessly as possible.
-Jeffrey Bromberger, Consultant – CISA, CRISC
Contact the consulting team at consultants@dataseti.com
Find us on dataseti.com or read us on dataseti.blog.
Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter!