Abstract

The world is increasingly becoming digitalized and interconnected, but this interconnection is often linked to cyber vulnerabilities and operational disruptions, thereby disrupting sensitive business data and tarnishing organizational reputation. Organizations across the globe are under continuous threat of disruption in newer ways.

With the prevalent global economic turmoil, pandemics, climate events, and geopolitical events broadening the threat landscape, organizations are in dire need of enabling technology-enabled resilience plans. They need means and tools to decipher their resilience posture- both operational and cyber to expand their safety net and ability to siphon off the potential business disruption.

Mitigating risks and enabling cyber and operational resiliency are key to safeguarding an organization’s operational integrity and IT assets. Many strategies ensure this, and technology lifecycle management is one of them.

Technology Lifecycle Management (TLM) is a mechanism to govern IT assets from procurement and adoption till retirement. It is aimed at optimizing the performance, cost-effectiveness, and security of these assets throughout their operational life while ensuring their adherence to business targets. TLM creates a resilient framework which adopts to evolving threats and operational issues by managing relationships with vendors and suppliers and prevents technology obsolescence by maintaining system compatibility.

Cyber and operational resiliency – Imperatives in Technology Lifecycle Management

Cyber resilience refers to an organization's ability to identify, respond, and recover swiftly from an IT security incident. Building cyber resilience includes making a risk-focused plan that assumes the business will at some point face a breach or an attack.

Operational resilience is defined as initiatives that expand business continuity management programs to focus on the impacts, connected risk appetite and tolerance levels for product or service delivery disruption to internal and external stakeholders (such as employees, customers, citizens and partners).

When a certain technology (hardware, software, middleware, database, platforms etc.) reaches their End-of-Life (EoL) or End-of-Support (EoS) phases, organizations face considerable hurdles which impede their operations, security posture, and compliance status. Some of these are critical to understand and make sure it doesn’t impact business-as-usual operations, and C-suite can mitigate the cyber risks through strategic planning and risk management:

• Security vulnerabilities: Both EoL and EoS technologies don’t get updates or patches, thereby making systems exposed to the latest cybersecurity vulnerabilities. For instance, software that doesn’t receive security updates becomes vulnerable to attacks, resulting in data and system breaches.
• Compliance bottlenecks: Using EoL or EoS technology can result in non-compliance with industry regulations, especially those requiring latest security measures. Organizations are at risk of facing legal penalties, hefty fines, and reputational damage for not being able to maintain compliant systems. For example, healthcare institutions which depend on unsupported software are susceptible to violate HIPAA regulations, resulting in steep fines.
• Operational issues: Utilizing legacy or unsupported technology can lead to abrupt system issues, resulting in downtime, decreased productivity, and business disruption. EOS hardware assets may not integrate with newer/niche technologies, proving detrimental for business processes and jeopardizing customer experience. For instance, legacy networking equipment that is incompatible with new software is likely to make the overall network unstable with connectivity issues.
• Increased costs: Maintaining and supporting EoL or EoS hardware/software is significantly costlier than investing in the latest or niche technologies. Organizations struggle to reduce operational costs due to the need for focused support and bespoke solutions to maintain functionality or reduce downtime.

Technology upgrades, while being ubiquitous for improved performance and security, post a range of challenges for customers. A steep learning curve, along with compatibility issues exacerbated by security and operational vulnerabilities, pose significant hurdles for CIOs to tackle. The key challenges faced by organizations while managing technology lifecycles include-

• Inadequate IT environment visibility leads to resource misuse, outages, and failures, delay in project delivery
• Outdated IT assets pose significant risks, including vulnerabilities and compliance violations
• Support costs for outdated hardware/ technology
• Specialized skills to manage technology lifecycle
• Inconsistent automation tools and practices followed across design and build, application onboarding and operations phases
• CAPEX-budget-driven organizations, technology refresh tends to be deprioritized
• No application compatibility validation with newer versions
• Operations issues, where performance, capacity, and security issues are too frequent, along with one automation approach which doesn't fit all applications

According to an industry perspective, 24% of IT budgets are wasted on technical debt each year, indicating that organizations need to address their aging technology.

Key triggers for TLM services

The dynamic market situation and the need for streamlining services for customers are some of the most pivotal triggers that drive the demand for lifecycle management services. Cyber and operational resiliency factors also drive the market where customers are looking to improve performance and capacity and set new security benchmarks. Successful implementation requires a collaborative effort among various departments and ongoing evaluations based on these factors to ensure technology remains aligned with organizations’ evolving needs and goals

Several trends that are propelling the technology lifecycle management services market include:

• Alignment to business and IT strategy
• Improved productivity and performance
• Improved service delivery, performance, and reliability
• Technology readiness for new business requirements
• Regulatory and compliance requirements
• Management of technology contracts and licensing agreements
• Gain a competitive edge in the market through innovation enablement

Benefits:

The success of a technology lifecycle management project depends on various factors, including business alignment, costs involved in tech transformation, security and risk management, improved agility and flexibility. Therefore, companies must plan and execute the technology lifecycle management process carefully and have a clear roadmap to ensure a smooth transition and minimize disruptions. However, companies must be aware of the challenges and address them promptly to ensure seamless technology lifecycle management. The technology lifecycle management program provides immense benefits for organizations to meet their digital technology transformation roadmap charter as it offers a multi-phased approach that simplifies and optimizes the infrastructure lifecycle and addresses associated risks.

1. Risk and gaps mitigation and contingency: Secures the IT systems that store, process, or transmit organizational information
2. Improved decision-making: Technical debt reduction and improving the information used for decision making and refresh planning
3. Lowered TCO: Enables business to plan and budget for both the technology purchase, and the additional costs associated with using the technology
4. Seamless/ uninterrupted IT services to business: Enabling business with secured and high-performance underlying technology
5. Release maturity: Plan, test and validate new release well in advance to ensure Infrastructure alignment to OEM Lifecycle guidelines and security requirements

How we are ensuring business resilience and transformation

By effectively managing the technology lifecycle and prioritizing operation and cyber resilience, organizations can mitigate risks, improve efficiency, and safeguard their digital assets. A well-crafted TLM strategy is pivotal to maintaining a secure and resilient digital infrastructure in the modern era where threat landscape has reached the pinnacle.

HCLTech already has proven credentials and a distinctive edge in providing these services to its customers with its expertise in legacy portfolio migration, trained and certified resources, 360-degree partnership with all the hyperscalers and other OEMs, experienced consulting architects who guide the migration / Upgradation of customers’ legacy (EOL / EOSL) OS, and accelerators and IPs to facilitate the modernization and upgrade activities.

To learn more, please write to us at HCBU-PMG@hcltech.com.

References:

• https://www.leanix.net/en/wiki/trm/what-is-end-of-life-vs-end-of-support
• https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/cybersecurity-risk-regulatory/tech-and-operational-resilience.html
• https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/operational-resilience
• https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/hybrid-work/what-is-cyber-resilience.html
• https://www.leanix.net/en/wiki/trm/what-is-technology-risk
• https://www.leanix.net/en/wiki/trm/technology-lifecycle-management
• https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/increasing-odds-of-success-in-digital-transformation
• https://www.leanix.net/en/download/the-5-types-of-obsolescent-tech
• https://www.cio.com/article/418987/8-top-priorities-for-cios-in-2023.html
• https://www.leanix.net/en/download/the-5-types-of-obsolescent-tech