What to do when you’re forced to stay on out of date software
In an ideal world all organisations would be running the latest software versions and upgrading when new versions came out, in order to benefit from the latest innovations and also to ensure that software was officially supported by the vendor.
Unfortunately, as we know, this is not an ideal world. IT teams live in the real world and know that much as they would like to be constantly on the cutting edge, this just isn’t always an option. There are a whole host of reasons as to why an organisation may need to stay on an unsupported database version:
Budgetary issues – perhaps the cost of an upgrade cannot be justified at the present time. IT budgets have been slashed in recent years and this has put immense pressure on organisations in deciding where to best allocate precious funds.
Time constraints – the time (and therefore budget again) which is involved in an upgrade can vary greatly and is often a real issue for smaller teams meaning that they have to stay on old software, at least for an agreed period of time until sufficient resource can be allocated.
Application issues – perhaps the application which you’re running on your “out of support” database doesn’t work on the latest version, thus forcing you to stay where you are.
The consequences of this really depend on what software we’re talking about. In database terms it could well mean that the skills to maintain that database version are no longer, or are dwindling, within the organisation. It could also mean that your IT infrastructure is more susceptible to issues of reliability and availability. There could even be regulatory implications.
Using a service such as Consultancy on Demand for out of support versions of DB2 is a great “insurance policy” for your DB2 database. Available in packages of 20, 50 or 100 hours of consultancy which can be called off as and when needed it’s highly cost effective.
You can use Consultancy on Demand hours however you like over 12 months. Perhaps you need a DB2 health check or maybe you need a readily available source of expertise for those tricky technical questions which often come up on older versions.