1. Understanding the Impact

First and foremost, your team needs to understand how this piece of software impacts the business. How does either migrating to a new solution or continuing to use an unsupported piece of software impact the business?

End of life means the vendor is no longer going to provide support or updates. Generally, you can continue to run the software, but it will be at considerable risk and typically requires a lot more work from your IT team to keep it running well.

Primary areas of impact for a business:

• Security issues: Regular software updates help maintain security; without the updates, the software is now vulnerable to security threats. Security vulnerabilities not only impact business data, but also customer information. It’s critical to the ongoing success of your business that your customers have confidence their information is secure.
• Compliance issues: Regulatory compliance continues to be a growing concern for many businesses. Without vendor support for software, ensuring your business maintains necessary compliance can be challenging—which threatens your overall business.
• Operational risks: Ongoing maintenance will be more problematic, and your business could suffer increased technical issues without support from the vendor for troubleshooting and maintenance. This increases the chance of downtime and typically creates inefficiencies in performing tasks across the organization.
• Budget: Both migrating to a new software solution and continuing to run an outdated and unsupported software solution have impacts on the budget. Understanding those impacts will help drive the path forward.

Migrating to a new solution is usually the best option to ensure your business remains secure, your operations run smoothly, and you continue to meet both business and customer demands.

2. Assessing Current Dependencies

Identify all the systems across your organization that are dependent on the software going into end of life. Examine the systems, processes, operations, customer engagements, and employee activities that utilize this software and identify the impact for each of these areas.

• Inventory checklist: Create a checklist of all instances where the software is utilized.
• Impact analysis: Once you have the checklist, evaluate each process and instance to determine if it’s critical to daily operations to better prioritize which areas require immediate attention and which can take a lower priority.

3. Exploring Alternatives

Once your team has mapped the dependencies and prioritized the critical daily processes, alternative solutions can be explored and evaluated. Your search will obviously start with similar types of software. Evaluating the software against the current functionality you enjoy—and your future business goals and needs—will help you identify a solution that not only will meet your needs today, but will grow with you as your business grows.

• Enterprise solutions: Solutions offered by the tech giants have great features and functionality, and most have leveraged AI to uplevel performance. Exploring these options could be a consideration if your business is large and you have a technical team that’s large enough, and has the right set of knowledge and skills, to properly handle the migration and maintain the solution going forward.
• Open-source options: If you’re not an enterprise level business, open-source solutions may be appealing, especially if your solutions often have customized workflows or involve heavy use of APIs. However, again, you need to consider whether you have the technical team needed to do the customization, efficiently migrate to a new environment, and maintain the software in the future.
• Partnerships: Companies who specialize in implementing and supporting technologies for other businesses are often a great path forward when you need to explore new software alternatives. These companies have a deep level of experience with business of various sizes, generally know the best solutions to meet needs, and can help you evaluate your current solution against your future business goals and advise on the best next step.

4. Ensuring Data Security

Data security is so important it is worth bringing it up again. Making sure whatever solution you choose can properly secure your data is essential. Your solution should have foundational data security functions to maintain your business and customer data.

• Data backup: Ensure you back up your current data prior to migration, as well as making sure your new solution has an easy button for data backup. Being able to automatically back up your system and data will help guard against future problems.
• Compliance: Do the alternatives meet your industry compliance standards and regulations? How do these alternatives ensure they keep pace with changes to these standards and regulations, so your business remains compliant?
• Secure transfer protocols: Are you able to utilize secure data transfer protocols with alternative solutions? How easy will it be to migrate your data from your existing software to the new solution?

5. Planning Migration

You’ve evaluated your business needs, and you’ve identified the impact of a new solution and the processes across the business that are critical to daily operations. Now, it’s time to plan the migration. Engaging with a partner is one of the best ways to ensure a smooth migration. A knowledgeable and experienced partner will be able to build a migration plan that meets your needs, budget, and timing. They’ll likely want you to identify a champion within your business that will help them keep your teams on track for their specific areas of action. Together, you’ll walk through the process and your partner vendor will ensure all critical and non-critical elements are identified and managed.

A typical migration plan will include:

• Phased approach: Processes that are critical to daily operations will be prioritized first. Phases will be laid out to ensure each component is stable before moving to the next. A good partner vendor will ensure that your business continues to run smoothly and will be ready for “go live” to address any unforeseen issues that may appear.
• Stakeholder communication: Maintaining current communication with the key stakeholders keeps the project on track, reduces potential downtime, and helps identify alternative options if needed. This is where your business champion is really important. Your partner vendor keeps constant communication with the champion, who helps organize the other key stakeholders.
• Testing: Before any new migration is live, thorough testing will take place. The new and old systems will often run in parallel to ensure the new system is running as expected before the full transition is completed.

Needing to migrate your solution to a new system due to software end of life can feel daunting. However, with careful planning, you can ensure your business continues to run smoothly. Partnering with a vendor that’s experienced in your industry, understands the various technology options, and can help you not only evaluate the options effectively, but also walk you through migration, is an approach that has the greatest assurance of success. Having a partner who is outside of your business also offers a perspective on critical issues you may miss. Their experience with other organizations and technology provides them with a unique perspective to what will and won’t work.

Next Steps

If you’re facing software end of life or simply need a new software solution, Concentrix can help. We’re the chosen partner for some of the world’s largest brands, helping them run their businesses by leveraging the most modern technologies to power digital transformation and ongoing customer success. Explore our CX Technology solutions, and how we can take your business into the future.