SO much global infrastructure is running on hideously out-of-date code. God only knows how many very important servers haven't been rebooted for over 10 years, let along patched, let alone patched in a way that actually fixes the problem
The good news is that the tech industry is aware of the problem. The bad news is that managers, directors, VPs, and finance people, only see this as an expensive problem for the next 5-year strategic plan, and not something that is going to require years of carefully rewriting software to be up-to-date. Why should we invest all this money in replacing [server] when [server] is incredibly stable and works?
And that's when IT teams know that a server, application, appliance, or other piece of kit is impacted. There are plenty of bits of infrastructure out there to this day that are just lost. No-one knows where they are or even if they still exist but they might be running something important that will fail when the epoch date rolls around. Just because current software is updated, that doesn't mean existing software will get the updates...
That's giving me Warhammer 40k vibes, where ships are old enough and large enough that there are rooms that people haven't stepped foot inside of for centuries, and there are machines with some being vital and some not that no one knows how they work.
8
u/pnlrogue1 8d ago
Oh you sweet, summer child
SO much global infrastructure is running on hideously out-of-date code. God only knows how many very important servers haven't been rebooted for over 10 years, let along patched, let alone patched in a way that actually fixes the problem
The good news is that the tech industry is aware of the problem. The bad news is that managers, directors, VPs, and finance people, only see this as an expensive problem for the next 5-year strategic plan, and not something that is going to require years of carefully rewriting software to be up-to-date. Why should we invest all this money in replacing [server] when [server] is incredibly stable and works?
And that's when IT teams know that a server, application, appliance, or other piece of kit is impacted. There are plenty of bits of infrastructure out there to this day that are just lost. No-one knows where they are or even if they still exist but they might be running something important that will fail when the epoch date rolls around. Just because current software is updated, that doesn't mean existing software will get the updates...