How Outdated Systems Are Putting Your Business at Risk

Over the last 30 years, I’ve seen companies make the same mistake — convincing themselves that clinging to familiar outdated systems and tools is the safest choice. Yet, time and again, doing nothing has proven to be the riskiest decision of all.

The sudden shift to remote work during the pandemic laid bare just how unprepared most organizations were for today’s digital-first reality. IT teams scrambled to expand capacity for systems that had barely evolved in decades: laptops running local applications, corporate networks patched together with outdated security protocols and a cloud strategy that often amounted to bolting on fragmented capabilities instead of a full-scale transition.

Companies that resisted modernization faced steep consequences, and many are still working to regain lost ground. However, the biggest consequence of delaying transformation is risk. Whether it is cybersecurity vulnerability, technical reliability or inhibitions to innovate, the longer organizations rely on outdated systems, the more risk they are obliged to manage — all for the sake of an unwillingness to evolve or a lack of prioritization.

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The rising cost of cybersecurity risks

Cybercrime directly affecting you and your organization isn’t some distant possibility anymore — it’s happening right now, and individuals and companies are paying the price. In 2023 alone, ransomware attacks drained businesses of over a billion dollars in payments. Having personally watched companies scramble to recover, I’ve seen them pour millions into remediation, either paying off the ransom in order to regain access or pouring massive unbudgeted resources into remediation and future prevention.

All of these costs could have been avoided with proactive modernization and better spent on company growth. Yet, too many organizations remain locked into outdated infrastructure designed for a world that never anticipated today’s level of cyber risk. In short, this is not your parents’ workplace anymore.

Beyond financial losses, cyber breaches disrupt operations, erode customer trust, lower employee morale and potentially expose businesses to regulatory penalties, leading to loss of stock price and company value. With ransomware-as-a-service lowering the barrier for attackers and AI-powered phishing campaigns exploiting human error, cyber threats are evolving at a relentless pace — becoming more deceptive, harder to detect and increasingly difficult to contain. No matter how advanced security defenses become, a single mistake — one click on a malicious link or one reused password — can compromise an entire system in seconds.

Outdated security models are crumbling in the face of rapid advancements in technology, leaving organizations increasingly vulnerable to breaches. And these aren’t just IT problems — they are existential business liabilities. From my perspective, the only effective way to counter these threats is by adopting a modern approach that leverages cloud-native, “this century” technology and where data no longer lives on laptops, access is continuously verified and implicit trust is eliminated. Without it, businesses expose themselves to unnecessary risk, making it all too easy for attackers to infiltrate their systems.

Related: Cybercrime Will Cost The World $8 Trillion This Year — Your Money is in Danger. Here’s Why Prioritizing Cybersecurity is Crucial to Mitigate Risk

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The underappreciated bonuses that come with modernization are massive. Modern infrastructure, when well implemented, is less cumbersome to manage, more able to scale based on demand and provides better cost for performance. However, the real value that is unlocked is in the form of reliability and agility. With modernization comes unprecedented opportunities to take advantage of true multi-cloud, bringing cloud-managed resources all the way out to the edge for continuity and inherent redundancy and resiliency.

Additionally, what has been the greatest barrier to innovation (i.e., we really want to leverage GenAI, but our data is a mess) is now pre-wired for rapid expansion into the latest capabilities, allowing companies to be more agile and able to respond to market changes, competitive landscapes, customer needs and employee velocity. Without these modernization investments first, these modern tools are stuck behind toil and cruft to bring them to production.

Overcoming the executive mindset barrier to modernization

In my work, I’ve found that the biggest barrier to modernization isn’t budget — it’s mindset. I’ve had countless conversations with executives who resist change simply because they’re comfortable with the familiar. They rely on their laptops, their decades-old productivity tools and the belief that change will cause more disruption than it’s worth. What they fail to see is that resisting modernization creates far greater disruption in the long run.

Take Nordic Choice Hotels, for example. Back in 2021, they had just started exploring modernization when a ransomware attack crippled their operations. In a scramble to recover, they accelerated their transition to Chrome OS Flex, restoring operations in days instead of months. While they ultimately modernized, the timing wasn’t there by choice — it was by necessity. The fact that they had already started exploring this option meant that they were already familiar with the technology and what they needed to do. They just had to do it on a timeline of someone else’s choosing. If there’s one lesson to take from their story, it’s this: The time to modernize is before disaster strikes, not after.

This hesitation to embrace change keeps organizations stuck in systems that will inevitably fail under pressure. The only real way to fix this problem is to address the root cause: archaic and outdated infrastructure.

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Future-proofing your business

For many executives, modernization and security concerns feel like it is all IT’s responsibility — something that can be patched as needed and kicked down the road. But this thinking ignores the bigger picture. As cyber threats evolve and regulatory pressures mount, patching is merely a short-term fix, not a solution. Instead of piling on more security measures, businesses must rethink their entire approach — shifting away from outdated infrastructure to eliminate vulnerabilities at the source.

Taking the first step doesn’t require a massive overhaul. Businesses can modernize incrementally — migrating from VMs to containers, replacing traditional databases with modern NoSQL solutions and transitioning from file-based to object-based storage. Even things like replacing traditional laptops with cloud-connected endpoints like Chrome devices or moving to cloud-native productivity tools like Workspace can provide tremendous benefits. Each phase delivers immediate benefits while laying the groundwork for further progress, but delaying only increases the complexity, cost and risk of transformation. The longer companies hesitate, the more they give up control over the timing and success of their own evolution.

Nature dictates we evolve or perish. Modernization will happen with you or around you. The only question is: Will you be determining where it will go, or will you be at the mercy of things beyond your control? Organizations that act now will dictate their own future — those that wait will have the decision made for them under far worse conditions. I know which path I’d choose.