A report released today by South African headquartered, global ICT solutions provider — Dimension Data — reveals that 45 percent of the network estates of the nearly 300 organisations the company assessed during 2011 will be obsolete within five years.
This figure is an increase of 38 percent on last year, the company reported.
According to the 2012 Network Barometer Report released today by Dimension Data, a key factor for this massive leap in early stage obsolescence is that equipment providers are moving more products to end-of-sale to allow for newer technology to be brought into the market.
At the same time, the percentage of devices sitting at the higher risk end-of-contract-renewal (EoCR) and end-of-engineering (EoE) stages has dropped dramatically from 86.2 percent to 20.8 percent.
The Report covers aggregate data compiled from 294 Technology Lifecycle Management (TLM) Assessments conducted by the Group in 2011 on organisations of all sizes and in all industry sectors.
Michael Abendanon, General Manager Network Integration at Dimension Data South Africa, explained that in the last two years, there has been a significant shift from product-oriented development to architectural-oriented development, in order to ensure support for the larger macro-technology trends such as virtualisation, video and enterprise mobility.
He further said: “A good example is Cisco’s Borderless Networks product portfolio. In the past few years, every major routing and switching product family has undergone a refresh.”
He further said they think organisations may be choosing to not refresh these devices as they’ve assessed that they are not carrying mission critical traffic, and therefore there’s minimum risk in letting them die off.
“The pace of technology innovation means that the usable life of the capital asset is smaller than ever before. Historically, clients planned and budgeted around a seven-year depreciation of their network. This data demonstrates that almost half of clients’ network estates will be LDoS within five years.” Abendanon said.
“What’s more, devices in earlier stages of obsolescence that still look to have usable life may be unable to support strategic technology investments such as mobility or video. Clients holding out for calendar-driven refreshes over upgrades, motivated by business agility, risk lagging behind their more future-focused competitors,” he added.
Other key findings in the Report include:
- Two thirds of all devices assessed in 2011 had at least one known security vulnerability; however, repeat users of the Technology Lifecycle Management Assessments had fewer vulnerabilities, with only 59% versus 75% of non-repeat users;
- Of the known security vulnerabilities discovered, four of the top ten most prevalent were new. Three of these have a high severity rating, while PSIRT #111895, which was found in 6 percent of network devices, carries a critical rating. Organisations need to ensure that their IOS patch management processes are comprehensive and that they screen for security vulnerabilities regularly; and
- Organisations considering desktop virtualisation and pervasive video need to refresh their routing and switching infrastructure. Only 18 percent of all access switches discovered would be able to support these technologies properly.
