Your Business Needs to Consider Implementing a Refresh Schedule

Businesses that depend on their technology try to stick with it as long as they can so as to not incur large unnecessary costs. Ironically, that may be the thing that is causing a lot of those costs. Today, we thought we would take a look at a couple of variables that can let you know it’s time to upgrade away from your current technology. 

Deciding when to upgrade your business’ technology isn’t always cut and dry. You have to consider the pricing and deployment models you want, and probably most importantly, whether or not the new technology strategy will be disruptive to your team’s productivity. Additionally, you need to know that when you do look to upgrade new technology that it will be compatible with your business’ needs.

Why Upgrade at All?

If you’ve been using the same technology for several years without many problems, you may ask, “why even upgrade at all?” Outdated technology can cost you in several ways, let’s briefly go through a few.

• Downtime - Older technology is prone to failure. Computers are extraordinarily complex machines and after some time their components can fail. Failing technology is one of the most recognized causes of downtime. Since there is so much operational capital tied up in your employees, technology failures can cause a lot of time where your staff is not actively working on revenue-generating or business-building tasks.
• Turnover - One situation that many businesses find themselves in over the past couple of years is a significant employee turnover. One of the main reasons cited by people leaving organizations is that their technology isn’t kept up to date. Employees, especially the younger ones just entering the workforce, demand suitable technology to work on, otherwise they will find an organization that has it. 
• Lack of Support - If your business has been using the same technology for a while, you may run into a situation where the software is no longer supported by the developer. This can be a major problem as unsupported and unpatched software has a significantly larger chance to have vulnerabilities. More vulnerabilities mean that it has a better chance of being hacked. 

What is the Average Refresh Timeline?

For the average business, you should consider refreshing your technology every three-to-five years. This is largely because of the factors listed above as well as the propensity for new technologies that are developed that can better help your processes. You can often get away with keeping your technology past five years, but remember, it may be more unreliable the longer you use it. 

What Types of Technology Need to be Upgraded?

Sure, your physical infrastructure needs to be constantly maintained and refreshed regularly, but most of that is due to the need to run the applications (with corresponding storage) that you need to run your business. Today, there are many more options available than just purchasing new servers. You can choose to utilize cloud-based servers, effectively offshoring your computing infrastructure to service providers that maintain the infrastructure you host your applications on. This can provide substantial cost savings insofar as you will be paying service fees rather than having to come up with large amounts of capital to purchase new infrastructure or pay a hefty amount of interest on a lease. 

It’s just not your central infrastructure that needs to be updated, either. You need to replace routers, switches, workstations, and accessories on top of implementing new technologies that may help automate parts of your business. All-in-all, it is important to consider the return each part of your computing infrastructure will have on your day-to-day operations and set up a refresh schedule that prioritizes them. Then you can piecemeal the rest of it as you go.

How We Can Help

At Pacific NorthWest Managed IT Services, we can not only help you plan out your refresh schedule, we can use our vendor relationships to procure your new technology fast. Our team of technicians can design, deploy, and support your entire business’ computing infrastructure to ensure that your new technology investments are working for your business. Give us a call at 1-208-449-1133 to have a discussion about how you plan to move your company’s computing refresh forward today.