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Deferred IT Maintenance Is a Ticking Time Bomb
snydeq writes "The underfunding of routine hardware replacement purchases and the degradation of aging enterprise apps pose systemic risk for many IT organizations, thanks to a ballooning 'deferred IT maintenance debt' in the decade since Y2K fears pushed enterprises to invest heavily in essential system upgrades, InfoWorld's Bill Snyder reports. And with sysadmins 'scrambling to keep systems up and running with budgets that barely cover the basics,' this 'IT debt' promises only to increase in the coming years, especially as IT continues to defer routine maintenance in favor of new 'cost-saving' initiatives, particularly around the cloud."
Well, it is sort of a "duh" story the way it is written, but OTOH the subject is not without merit.
I have been involved with infrastructure assessment of companies prior to acquisition and some stuff is just shocking. Publicly owned companies are driven by return to the shareholders; one way to keep the dividends flowing when the economy is in a downturn or when the business plan isn't working is to reduce operational expense.
Releasing employees is very effective to reduce the spend side but usually that means there is less available effort to work on maintenance. It looks good to have all employee time capitalized on projects but who is keeping stuff working? Also, each person out the door takes expertise with them that is lost to the company. After a while, the company may not even have enough knowledge internally to understand that their boat has holes in it and that patching isn't happening.
This isn't smoke; I've seen it. Data centers with overheating problems and with inadequate standby generators. Power is distributed unwittingly to cause a cascading failure if one breaker trips. Leaking roofs over financial servers (plastic tarp and bucket gave that away). Licensing that has not been kept up to date because no one has a good inventory and no one wants to look-see. So... Oracle enterprise instances running in non-secure network zones and without proper licensing ( potentially million$ in back costs). A database server being used as a network monitoring node and firewall because funds were not available to separate the functions.
Deferred infrastructure investment and maintenance investment happens and it is a ghastly mess to clean up. I am not surprised that more of this is happening.