8 signs that outdated IT systems are killing your business

Poor productivity inevitably leads to overburdened support teams. You may find that your organization isn’t aligning with industry-standard IT user ratios, Sullivan says. “This can be a sign that you’re losing investment in your IT team since, instead of spending time strategically focused on advancing business objectives, they’re routinely fighting fires, trying to keep aging client devices, software, servers, or network infrastructure running,” he warns. “The end result is always a losing proposition, since you’re sinking valuable IT human capital into trying to keep systems afloat, only to have their performance remain less than optimal due to their age.”

7. Rising maintenance costs

One of the clearest signs of an outdated system is rising IT maintenance costs, says Stoyan Mitov, CEO of software development firm Dreamix. “If you’re consistently spending money keeping your systems from collapsing, rather than using that budget to automate or scale, this is a clear sign that your IT systems might need an update.”

Outdated IT systems create performance bottlenecks that eat into engineering time and delay service delivery, Mitov says. “Time gets lost to work-arounds and burdens teams with an infrastructure that isn’t built to handle the scale and speed current operations demand.”