Dell EMC SourceOne’s End-of-Life approaches; while it may seem there is still plenty of time before it arrives, as Dell has quietly announced it to be in 2024, this is not as far away as it appears. Organizations with a significant quantity of data captured in SourceOne must identify a suitable replacement system, prepare the new solution, and migrate the old data before shutting down the legacy system – all before the looming deadline.
What does SourceOne’s End-of-Life mean for current users?
End-of-Life is the final stage for software development, coming after End-of-Service and marking a complete close to the lifecycle; as such, software that reaches EoL rapidly begins accumulating several issues for the user:
Security gaps:
After End-of-Life, software is no longer patched, meaning newly discovered security vulnerabilities and exploits remain both present and, crucially, well known to malicious actors. This can open up vulnerabilities in your organization’s entire structure as a whole, exploiting the unpatched software to affect more systems.
Increased costs:
Organizations that neglect to replace their EoL software often justify this decision by saying they do not want to incur costs by purchasing an entirely new solution. In fact, the exact opposite is true: overhead costs on running defunct software mount exponentially as time goes on. Without support, downtime is longer and harder to overcome. Expertise with the system becomes rarer and more expensive as well, stretching overtime costs. Taking this into account, and adding the additional work inherent in older systems with worse quality-of-life features and lower efficiency, the costs of keeping EoL software running can rapidly spiral.
Compliance challenges:
We’ve written extensively about the increasing focus on legal regulation with regards to data handling. Older software past their End-of-Life will not be updated to keep these newer regulations in mind; in some cases, this is a relatively minor issue. With archives or backups, as with SourceOne, this is critical and puts your company at increased risk of legal sanction for improper data handling and storage.
Compatibility issues:
Issues can also arise with compatibility; no software exists in a vacuum, and how it interacts with other systems and solutions is a constant question. When major updates occur, as in the case of Microsoft’s depreciation of Remote PowerShell in favor of more secure options, unsupported systems may find their function partially or completely impaired, putting business operations and continuity at risk.
These issues, and more, compound to create snowballing problems for the organization using out-of-date software. As such, steps need to be taken promptly to address the root cause of the issue and ensure your organization is not left trying to maintain a past-End-of-Life system on life support.
How do organizations prepare for the coming End-of-Life?
When taking all the possible concerns outlined above into account, the only correct solution for organizations is to begin looking at migrating your critical data from the soon-to-be defunct legacy system to a more current one. This migration process should keep your existing data intact and organized, allowing business continuity to be maintained and allowing your organization to continue on as before.
However, this process comes with a number of pitfalls. Migrating files internally is no easy task, especially at the data volumes typically encountered when looking at backup systems or archiving solutions. This can be exacerbated if the individuals who had set up either system have since left your organization, leaving the data structure unclear.
To avoid these potential issues in your migration, the obvious step is to seek a purpose-developed tool for completing the migration process all the way from data backup and moving the data to final validation – as well as a trusted partner who has previous proven experience in this field. To that end, TECH-ARROW would like to present your best possible solution:
Why migrate your EMC SourceOne with contentGATE?
With TECH-ARROW’s contentGATE, we provide your organization a controlled and automated way of migrating data from EMC SourceOne to a target system of your choosing. Avoid downtime during the migration process, as well as any errors stemming from human mistakes or issues in the software. Easily migrate your whole EMC SourceOne archive in simple and clear steps, cutting down on the time this process will take and therefore both the incurred costs and risks.
TECH-ARROW and contentGATE have a proven track record in the field of archive migration. With us, the needs of the customer always come first, and the migration is fine-tuned to best reflect your organization’s needs – whether that be constant access to archived data with minimal downtime, a faster process, priority given to particular groups of users, or more!
If these possibilities interest you – don’t delay and contact us. Our team will be in touch to determine the scope of your migration, and will be with you every step of the way from the proof-of-concept all the way to the final end. Archive smarter – with TECH-ARROW.
Take the best steps to protect your data – with TECH-ARROW.
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