Bundled, all-in-one solutions make upgrades easy with simplified OEM licensing and technical support.
New and improved versions of major relational database management systems (RDBMSs) are released every year or two, but business customers rarely rush to upgrade their database software. Cost-conscious management teams and overworked IT staff both face incentives to “leave well enough alone,” and, as long as critical applications are still supported on the old database servers, the resource-intensive job of performing these upgrades is often relegated to the back burner.
But if businesses continue to put off upgrades, they can fall several generations behind in their RDBMS software—and also find themselves stuck on outdated hardware. Many businesses, for example, are still relying on Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 R2 or earlier, for which support officially ends in July 2022.1 And in fact, as many as 60 percent of businesses running SQL Server were running SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 as late as July 2019—the same month support ended for these versions.
Relying on unsupported software is extremely risky for both your company and your customers because it leaves your servers exposed to newly discovered security exploits. And falling behind technically short-changes your organization by depriving you of the many new software enhancements and hardware advancements that help you remain competitive.
If your company is running an outdated version of SQL Server on legacy hardware, but you’ve been held back by concerns about the difficulty and cost of upgrading, the best way forward is to find a simple and cost-effective upgrade path from a trusted source.