Hi Graeme, thanks for making the time to catch up with me. Thanks, George for the opportunity as well to talk about this.
Graeme, what techniques could the business have used to identify that orphan software beforehand?
George, I guess they need to understand the inherent risk they have of being reliant. Even if it’s indirectly, on a piece of software that doesn’t have ownership and by ownership. I mean there isn’t someone curating it, maintaining it, keeping it healthy. And this is more important than ever these days from a cybersecurity perspective.
It would be best if you had the surrounding IT environment. Always up to date to the current patches and updates that are available. I think the first step is recognising what are those little pieces of software you’re reliant upon and maybe in the background and you don’t notice them.
But if you take that example of running a scenario, what happens if this thing stops working tomorrow? what would be the impact? who would we turn toto diagnose the problem or provide us a way forward?
So, I guess first step identifying that orphan software doing that scenario analysis if they stop working tomorrow, what would you do? Who would you be able to go to help provide an immediate reaction to get it working again? But then also what is your plan to take that forward?
You know we see that businesses have invest a lot of time in their strategies in having approaches of continuity, also having a way of evolving how their technology will evolve together in the organisation, and these little pieces of orphan software. Because they’re not on the radar or not visible aren’t considering in those but the criticality that they support in the business can have that big impact.
So I guess understanding where that orphan software is, what is the business function at supporting? what is your go to? what is your plan B if that stopped working?
Answer those questions and then you can say well who are the organisations that you could turn to if your internal IT organisation don’t know about it or aren’t skill up, even to support that older technology. We don’t want to be stuck trying to find someone quickly in those aha moments.
So who are the organisations that could do that, how do you contact them and then get that expertise on the table to help you understand? what are your options of upgrading or transitioning or migrating the data behind the orphan software as well?
Thanks, Graeme, so you can see that the service we provide where we investigate that orphan software is important. A lot of people are in a sense of calm and a steady-state environment where things are working, but they’re sitting on these time bombs.
I think they need to take some action to locate those things, bring Softlogic in. So, we can assess those particular solutions and find ways to maintain them and to look after them properly and keep them running reliably for the client.
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