Blog / 15 June 2026
Planning around end-of-support dates instead of reacting to them
Every network has a piece of hardware nobody wants to touch. It works, so it stays, until the day it does not and the replacement has a twelve-week lead time.
Keep a register
One sheet per site: model, serial, install date, support contract end, vendor end-of-sale and end-of-support dates. Review it twice a year. That is the entire discipline.
Budget in tranches
Replacing an entire fleet in one fiscal year is rarely approved. Splitting by criticality — core and firewalls first, access layer next, edge devices last — turns a large capital request into a plan that finance can accept.
Keep spares that match
A shelf spare only helps if it is the same model and license tier as what is deployed. Standardizing on fewer models across sites is the cheapest resilience you can buy.
We maintain the register for managed customers and flag items twelve months before support ends.