How Evergreen IT Can Break the Cycle of Endless Software Updates

We’ve come a long way from the days where the ability to deploy software updates was viewed as a breakthrough for enterprise organizations. Today, they often represent a significant portion of the workload for enterprise IT departments.

While software updates remain critical to effectively building and maintaining a sustainable, cost-effective enterprise technology stack, an over-reliance on software updates—along with some bad-faith business models dependent on constant software updating and maintenance—has turned these constant updates into the greatest source of tech debt at many organizations.

The more time IT spends on software updating, the less your company’s IT time and resources are available for other needs, from employee and customer service tickets to enterprise development projects. Yet if your business is still running on a legacy IT infrastructure, these cumbersome software updates are essential to keeping your technology stack up and running—unless you’re able to transform your entire IT infrastructure by migrating to a cloud-based environment.

While many businesses have avoided this migration because of its cost and complexity, an experienced third-party service management (TPSM) partner can help you plan and manage both the transition itself and the costs that come with it. On the other side of this transformation is a new mode of IT management that features fewer software updates and a more cost-effective use of internal and outsourced IT talent.

Breaking Free From Forced Software Updates

When proprietary software is managed by the developer itself, or an authorized service provider, enterprise organizations are often unable to dictate the terms of these software updates. These proprietary solutions lock out other parties from implementing software updates for those applications, which in turn forces your organization to pay for their services if you want to maintain that software within your tech stack.

While this doesn’t necessarily place a direct burden on your IT department, it does represent a financial and resource cost to your organization. Too often, these costs are not balanced out by value offered by those software updates: Companies like IBM, for example, maintain a 95 percent margin across their software servicing operations, reflecting both the inflated cost and limited return offered by those services.

In the end, your business is forced to keep paying for high-priced updates and servicing because you have no viable alternative. Those service providers, meanwhile, have an incentive to keep delivering software updates to maintain your business, even when those updates offer marginal improvements to security, functionality, or other aspects of app performance.

When businesses switch to evergreen IT, their reliance on modern, cloud-based infrastructure inevitably leads to simpler and less intensive updating, which lowers maintenance costs, reduces application downtime, and scales down the line expense attributed to IT infrastructure updating costs.

Eliminating the Burden of Iterative Updating

Whether updates are performed by in-house IT, third-party IT partners, licensed service providers or a combination of these IT professionals, the cost always falls on your organization. These updates can also create ancillary costs and burdens for in-house IT to address, such as customer IT troubleshooting and maintenance for integrated applications affected by these constant updates.

Legacy IT infrastructure is as fragile as it is intricate—and even minor updates can create integration issues that may require attention from your IT department. The task of maintaining this delicate ecosystem only gets more difficult and resource-intensive over time, which is another reason to embrace evergreen IT: by implementing a more modern tech stack, your business can leverage app integrations for better tech synergy and more cost-effective IT resource allocation.

Shifting Resources to Value-Added IT Management

If your business is running on a legacy IT infrastructure, the odds are high that your IT department is overworked. When IT personnel are forced to spend their time on quantitative processes like managing software updates, their skills and time are taken away from other tasks and projects that deliver long-term value to their organizations.

For example, constant updating cycles reduce the resources available for IT departments to perform QA processes across the IT infrastructure. This workload also stands in the way of projects that support long-term enterprise planning and revenue generation, including—conveniently—migration projects to move the company from legacy-based IT infrastructure to the modern conveniences of evergreen IT.

While your existing IT professionals and partners keep up with the workload of managing these software updates, enterprise organizations can map out their switch to evergreen IT by partnering with the third-party service management company specializing in cloud-based IT infrastructure projects. Origina’s team of industry experts can help you manage IT costs to create budgetary space to accommodate this massive infrastructure project, paving the way to a future where software updates are only performed on an as-needed basis, and at a fair price.

Discover more business benefits of transitioning to evergreen IT—get in touch with us today or download our free guide, “Managing Tech Debt On the Road to Evergreen IT,” today.