Upgrades Are an Investment
Upgrading to SonicWall Gen7 is not a business expense. It’s an investment meant to mitigate serious and significant risk. It is a core part of your responsibility to your customers to make sure they are fully aware of those risks and the consequences of choosing NOT to upgrade. You really DO want to be in a position to say “I told you so…” so you can tell them, up front, that you DON’T want to have to say it.
You’ve probably heard every objection imaginable when you’re recommending upgrades. “What we have ain’t broke, so don’t fix it”, “Everything is working so smoothly, let’s not rock the boat”, “For what we spent, these things should last forever”, and “We’ve never had an outage” are just a few.
Your Customers Are Looking at This All Wrong
Your customers are focusing on the hardware they’ve purchased, and they see them as something that works the way it’s supposed to work and does what it’s supposed to do.
But that’s not what’s actually important to them.
What’s important is that their data and their networks are kept secure and productive. They want to be sure unauthorized people can’t access them. They need to keep everything protected and high performance.
When they invested in the infrastructure they currently have, the technology they obtained was the very best the market had to offer… at that time!
But progress truly does march on, and so do cybercriminals. They’re working full time at finding or creating threats nobody ever anticipated or revealing operator errors and misconfigurations that leave you vulnerable. Even while our technology is getting better, so is theirs.
Then Add Innovation
When customers upgrade their infrastructure, they immediately enjoy the benefit of all the innovation that has been built into their new equipment and software. Others simply do not. And that’s no small matter! Every business becomes more and more competitive all the time. No company can afford to miss out on new advantages their competitors are embracing. There are just too many threats out there constantly evolving for anyone to delay available improvements in their protection.
What Happens When Infrastructure Enters “Retirement Mode?”
It would be nearly impossible for manufacturers to continue to support every product they’ve ever released over time. Eventually, they must cease offering updates, patches, and other support for products that have been discontinued and replaced with newer models.
SonicWall has a very clearly defined schedule of events that provide you and your customers the time to plan, prepare, and perform upgrades on equipment reaching end-of-life (EoL). It is worth your while to review these stages with your customers, and come back to them as the end of each stage approaches to remind them to upgrade before product support is completely discontinued.
The stages of this process are as follows.
Last Day Order (LDO) is the beginning of the process, at which time SonicWall announces the intention to start the end-of-life process. Products in this phase are active and continue to sell support contracts.
Active Retirement Mode (ARM) is when SonicWall no longer actively manufactures or sells the product. Support contracts for products in this phase will continue to be available. A limited number of new features may still be released, and bug fixes issued only to the latest version of firmware available on the device.
One-Year Support Last Day Order is, as it says, the final day to purchase a one-year support contract or subscription service that bundles support from SonicWall Partners. The covered product will be eligible to receive support until the product has reached the End of Support.
Limited Retirement Mode (LRM) is when no more firmware updates or new features for these products will be developed or released. Support is then limited to critical bugs and security vulnerabilities. This remains active for three years beginning one day after the end of the Active Retirement Mode stage.
End of Support (EOS) is when technical support, firmware updates/upgrades, or hardware replacement for the product will no longer be provided.
End of Life (EOL) is when the product is completely and finally decommissioned.
This may sound like a long, exaggerated process, but it is designed to best serve and accommodate your customers, especially those who may be resistant to upgrading for whatever reason. Once any technology product reaches EOL, it becomes the primary target for cybercriminals who know that security updates are no longer being provided.
You serve your customers best by educating them on the excessive risk they are encumbering when they don’t invest in appropriate upgrades when they become available. Technology requires diligence and constant attention. Your persistence in keeping your customer advised is the very best thing you can be providing to them.
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An Article By
An Article By
Chirag Saxena
Chirag Saxena
