In recent days I have been thinking a lot about the costs of having hardware. In my household we six kids. On a daily basis we have at least one or two of the kids say they have some homework assignment that involves using a computer. It has become painfully apparent to the kids that a new PC might be needed. Right now I have two work laptops and my wife has another laptop and then we have a castoff PC that I reimaged so the kids could use that. Unfortunately the cast off PC is at the end of its useful life and over the last 6 months I have replaced the power supply in my wife's PC twice. So it is time for me to start thinking about something new. The PC that I bought for my wife is probably only 3 years old which doesn't seem that old to me but it is having its issues.
So what does my family issues have to do with a forgotten cost. This same issue that I am experiencing at home is the same one IT departments are grappling with on a daily basis. Most electronic equipment is meant to have a useful life of around 3-5 years. By the time you hit the 2 to 3 year mark you start seeing that the applications that you have running on them just aren't performing like they used to. Also things just start to break. Fans get noisy, hard drives crash, strange errors start to appear, etc.
All these things bring on this desire to replace infrastructure every three years or so. In a home setting that typically is not that big a deal but it can cause some disruption. You have to start going through the old computer and decide which stuff you need and which stuff is worth keeping. You need to start looking at the applications that you have on PC and moving them to the new PC. You have to find all the software that you loaded on the old PC and hope that it will work on the new PC (and hope that the license keys will still be good). More than likely there is a new version of the operating system so you need to learn where Microsoft moved everything so you can do the most mundane tasks. There are also 100 other things that I home user needs to do get up an running and it all takes time.
This same thing happens for business when they have to refresh their technology. They need to go through process of figuring out what is important on that computer and if what they are using is still going to work on a new server. Many organizations put the storage in external disk drives so that the migration from one server to another becomes easier. Also virtualization technology has helped make the move more seamless. New software may need to be purchased and the new server may need to reloaded and multiple groups may need to be involved in the configuration process. Many organizations have become quite efficient in migrating and standing up new environments but migrations have always been high the risk meter. Lets also assume that you are back revisions on the software and you need to do upgrades to the software. That can lead to enormous amounts of work.
A lot of people when considering moving the equipment get caught up with how much the equipment is going to cost them and they will pit vendors against each other in a death match to provide the best price for the equipment. This however is one of the smaller costs of this transaction. The true costs like in getting on old system moved onto new hardware. There is planning, and testing and change windows that need to be set up. There is potentially a reconfiguration process that may need to be done and a cost of labor to set everything up again. Most people may look at these costs as sunk costs because they have to pay their employees anyway but the time that it takes to get everything up an running and running on the new versions of the software can be significant. Add on upgrades to software or operating systems and you start talking some money.
This is why I have become an advocate for more cloud based approaches to computing. Instead of footing the bill for new hardware every 3 years you leave someone else to worry about that. They also are responsible for making sure your systems still work at the end of the day. I am particularly fond of SaaS services because they are in charge of not just the hardware but making sure the application continues to work after an upgrade. If you do a comparison of the costs of consistently buying new hardware every three years you are probably going to come up with a small ROI. If you think about it as a way to avoid the 3-5 migration project that disrupts a lot of people then benefits become a lot more obvious.
Well, that still leaves me with my old PC at home that I need to replace. Wish me luck as I go through my triennial pilgrimage to the land of laptop migrations. Hopefully I don't hit many of those forgotten costs.
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