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You know, like you always start with like what's an interesting fact about you and those are kind of hard sometimes.

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What's a normal fact about you?

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Oh, I like that.

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It's like you get like, you get like different ones. I would say mine is I sleep on my stomach.

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It's my sleeping position.

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Interesting.

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So I've had time to think about it.

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I like that.

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Yeah, I like this a lot. I don't eat breakfast.

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Oh, okay.

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I just don't.

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Just, is this just a weekend or just never been a breakfast person?

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I think I was made to when I was a kid. It was like, you have to have breakfast in the morning.

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And then as soon as I like went to college, I was like, enough of that.

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So I have my coffee and I'm done required. Yeah.

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Nice.

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I am technically over five foot, which is a big deal.

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That's perfect. I like it.

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By the doctor, I am over five.

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Yes. Yes, I am. It's like I put in a quarter, but I still got that quarter.

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These are all technically incredibly normal. I really like this question, Geronik. That's great.

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Thank you. I can't take too much credit for it.

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I saw it on a social media site, but it's one of those where it just makes you think a little better.

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What's a normal fact about me?

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He uses it with his like middle schoolers and almost like, I feel like that's a great icebreaker for that age group as well.

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Yeah.

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Being like, what's an interesting fact? It's like, what's a normal fact?

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Yeah, for sure.

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I have to use this with other people now. Thank you.

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You're welcome.

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It's a great thing to do.

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I'm going to take a second to think about it too. I had to really think about it, but today on our Tech for Business podcast,

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Matthew, our GRC analyst in VCSO and Andrew, our customer service or customer strategy advisor,

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join us to discuss hardware lifecycle.

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And to kind of start us off, my first question is why? I mean, why are we discussing this today?

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Oh, where to start?

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You know, I would start off with technologies changing all the time.

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And it's if you're not updating your behind and having a plan for how you're updating.

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And today, specifically about workstations and the devices that users interact with every day is, you know, if you're not updating it,

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you get a lot more support issues. There's a lot more tickets and unexpected expense when it comes to your budget and being able to have a consistent budget or replacement.

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Yeah, I agree. There's really that proactive reactive side to it of proactively, are you prepared for the expenses to the business?

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And reactively, are you prepared for the unexpected expenses to the business from an individual not being out of work, replacing a machine you're expecting to replace?

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I'm sure we all have experience with those workstations just dying.

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And if you want prepped in some way, if you didn't expect that or you haven't done part of this process that says, I need this computer to be alive for this amount of time.

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And the things you can do to prep for that, you're reactively trying to run the business, which can have, you know, a person being out of commission because they're a remote worker without a machine for three days.

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Do you know what the consequences of that are for the business?

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You probably should. And that's why this lifecycle can kind of come into play for that.

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It's kind of like, we've talked about it before with risk analysis and different things like this is a form of risk in the hardware being just if, I was always told, if electricity runs through it, it's going to fail.

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We don't know when, not all the time, but sooner or later it's going to fail.

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Sometimes you get a lemon out of the factory and it fails a month into you having it and that's why you have a warranty.

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Sometimes it can be that workhorse.

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You know, I think we've all seen like those old printers that your parents have that you're just like, you haven't replaced this in 25 years, but it can still print out, you know, like that black and white paper.

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Sooner or later, everything that has electricity running through it is going to die.

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And it's just trying to be ahead of that replacement.

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And making sure that you know that you have the functionality of that device.

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And you can depend on it.

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Exactly. And so, Jiren, if you and I spoke about this earlier, but the, the, and you mentioned it briefly before.

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The distinction of lifecycle for different devices, network devices, you know, firewall switches, things like that is significantly different to what it is for the workstation.

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So workstations are something that we can all agree have, you know, not the biggest depending on your network, but a significant impact on everyone.

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So when it comes to getting getting those workstations ready and having that risk assessment in place, what's something that you focus on?

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I focus on kind of like, I don't know, kind of looking and asking if they have a workstation replacement in place already.

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If they do, great. We can continue that and work on it.

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If not, it's really kind of talking with them about the business.

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What do you do? Manufacturing is going to be different than a law firm is going to be different than a municipality.

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And so really identifying the, the criticality and the different job roles in the software that runs on those is really paramount.

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And the biggest example I use is, is engineering and CAD.

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We work in several different industries, one of them being manufacturing.

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You need to have an updated graphics card and a GPU in order to run these programs.

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Usually the heavy hitters where I'm just like, you should probably replace those for those individuals every three to five or sorry, three to four years at minimum.

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And that's not saying that you have to get brand new ones and those go in the trash, right?

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It's okay. This individual has or these individuals get this replacement on this certain timeframe and then they go to accounting or into the warehouse where there's less, less draw on those resources.

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But it's making sure that I think in the end, people have what they need to do to work.

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And so if that's, you know, making sure that you have a device that can run CAD or can print labels.

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So really identifying the need for different role types.

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And that kind of puts it, we've talked, we talked about it earlier before this, but like kind of tiers, which it's tiers role based, you know, you can kind of look at it that way.

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But really identifying who needs the shiny new equipment and identifying that.

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And then it kind of trickles down of, okay, so we have, you know, accounting, some of the clerical staff, you know, those that don't have as much draw on the resources.

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Okay, what's that life cycle look like if you're taking those devices and recycling them making sure that they still get updated as well because again, knowing the life cycle is going to help you budget.

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Yeah.

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And then really, okay.

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Some of the conversations I have are like, we're going to go until they die. And that's not recommended because you know, Matthew on the security side will be like, well, time out, there's security flaws, there's exploits.

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There's a lot of things that can go wrong with that.

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And I 100% agree.

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If it can run the security tools 99% of the time and if they want it, they're just gonna keep running it. But the important side of that is making sure that you have something on site is my recommendation to replace that right away if it doesn't have a warranty.

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If you're running until it dies. Okay, that's fine. It's just printing labels.

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But the job role of that label printer.

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Yeah, is that if that machine dies, you can't ship anything out.

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Or even if it's just your UPS machine and I can do it. Okay, you can still send FedEx but you can't send UPS.

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So making sure you have some sort of spare or some sort of device that's consensus consistently turned on and you know getting patches and getting getting the recent AV or updates from EDR, all the different security tools that you can plug and play if it's needed.

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So that's another conversation I have as well.

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I agree with all of that. It's there's so much to cover here that I kind of want to talk about it in terms of how I do it specifically and when I started doing this for the first time.

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The only way I could do it was to do it for myself and then expand out so I just brought up and you know empty Excel document and listed my computer.

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Listed all the software that I have to use for my job based it on how critical that software was for me and we've done a podcast previously on RTO and RPO and this is basically what my introduction to that was was was doing this for myself.

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And then I listed how often when it was being replaced or how when I wanted it replaced what those requirements would be the cost of that and all of a sudden I had this document that showed exactly what the specifications this machine needs to be and how much that was going to cost and when I replaced it.

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I know a lot of people don't believe in warranties, but I feel like in my experience that's because they've never had to use one in a business context like this before. Some of the support you can get with these machines is flying someone out to replace the machine for you next day, depending on how much you're willing to spend.

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So it can be incredibly useful. In my case I basically recommend four year warranties and then you replace the device in the fifth year. That's very generic. It's always specific to you.

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And then we kind of move on to that role based right so if my machine has these requirements on it. How can I make that match someone else's machine.

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You mentioned differences between accounting and things like that, but the specifications for software and the specifications for users. Because sometimes it's not a specification for a software.

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Sometimes you use just wants the best and they're allowed to have that that's a decision that's been made by the organization. Cool, they get one of those machines to defining that defining who maybe doesn't need that.

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And all of a sudden you just start adding all the machines you look after into this list and you've got basically a replacement plan.

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It grows very quickly because once you have those baselines of that life cycle and the tears or role based depending on how you're doing it, it just kind of comes together.

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It's not fast.

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Maybe there's a lot of conversations you need to have about who's got what type. But there does tend to be consistency even in places that doesn't seem like there's a lot of consistency for who needs what type of machines what they're doing.

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Once you've got it all in place.

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There's a sense of, I mean comfort is the one that the ability to sleep better because I'm not stressed about it is the one you'll hear me mention the most in the other podcasts.

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But it really does happen. It's nice to know what's needed, what needs to be done.

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And you'll often find if you haven't been doing this that there's a inconsistent replacement time.

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So maybe you're replacing a whole bunch of machines at once. And so one of the reasons you think that it's very expensive to replace workstations is because it is when you're dropping the amount of 10 workstations at once.

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But you can stagger that when you're planning.

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Maybe you replace one right at the five year mark or the four year mark and then you just do a couple of machines every month and that price is still the same but it's monthly instead of being all in a two times throughout the year.

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It just makes it easier to budget.

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Yeah, yeah, I've seen that with introducing this concept to some customers who don't have it where they did a big spend in let's say 2020 and we're looking at a three year budget.

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And you see that big workstation number in the six digits in 2025.

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And, you know, this is the time to talk about it right is okay it's here in 2020. Here's what 2025 looks like. Let's spread that to the, I don't know $2,000 you have for the workstation in 2024.

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Is there somebody who, you know, should get a new one.

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You know, let's look at some of the tickets is there somebody who's been submitting a lot of tickets.

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And we can say, on the same end of, okay, what can we do to spread that into 26. Who doesn't need one.

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And be able to look at that budget through the three year five year lens and say, yeah, you have a big cap X, because of this big buy. That's not a bad thing.

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And one of the devices as you said is there's that fluctuation of buying and devices last different, even the same workstation can perform differently over the years.

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I think that's just, you know, really having a grip on the business and understanding, you know, the role that technology plays in getting your job done.

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I mean, yeah, and there's, you and I both experienced that end of end of life, right for, I mean, XP, obviously, but Windows seven end of life.

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And there was a lot of people who were seeing a huge cost increase to their their thing because all of a sudden it was every machine that needed to be replaced, because maybe the tools they use required Windows 10 now.

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And not to be a harbinger of doom, but Windows 10 goes end of life in October of 2025.

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We're a little over two years away from that.

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So you are, if you haven't prepped for this already, you're two years away from potentially having that exact same experience again that you had with Windows seven machines.

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And 75% of the workstations and that is a pure, I'm guessing 75% of the workstations should be able to run Windows 11.

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Yeah, I mean, we don't know maybe that's gonna change right exactly but it but it's it's that it's that 25% that will keep you up and being like, is my business going to be able to work.

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If I don't do it. If you buy a new workstation now it's going to have a lot of fun on it.

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And if you've if you've spent a lot of time buying the everything we desperately need this workstation, let's buy it. And you mentioned this before with CAD, Andrew that there are specific drivers you need for CAD.

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You can't just run a regular machine and hope it's going to work. You need to make sure that the graphics card works with it, etc.

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If you're doing that, but on top of that you're also saying is the OS gonna run on it and you spent the past couple of years just buying whatever machine was available to you because it didn't need CAD maybe you even ran to Costco and just picked up whatever the quickest one was which please don't do that.

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Then you're going to be especially hit during this changeover.

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And while it's not pleasant to have to say alright I need to set aside this amount of money to replace these workstations, you're going to have to do it anyway. So let's plan ahead.

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Yeah, and you know on the on the kind of the sales side is, you know, working through a vendor like CIT or or anyone else is we have relationships with with the vendors. So if you're not, you know, brand like we're brand agnostic.

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For the most part where it's like, if you want to, in my opinion, it's they're a lot of the same now.

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There used to be a big discrepancy and oh you went with Dell versus HP versus Gateway versus whatever, Illinois.

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In my opinion, there's a more continuity.

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And it's really finding the best deal. And if you know that you're going to purchase 10 workstations in the next year, you know, it's nice to have a partner that can say, Hey, did you HP is running this promo deal and you can get, you know, you can buy five of them now or 10 of them now and be able to save X amount of dollars because they're running a

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different one. And it's because you know that you're going to have, you know, purchase a certain number.

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So you can get that bulk and said, as you said, going to Costco and just, you know, buying one off of the shelf.

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And again, if you take nothing else away from this, please don't go and buy a work computer from just Costco.

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There's a bunch of reasons not to, but they very often mix and match different types of RAM. And you know, a four gig stick and a two gig stick, which is going to have speed issues and also not be enough for Windows, but just don't do it.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, I agree.

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I think a lot of what we talked about today is the importance of planning and thinking ahead. And I know you both sat down with customers and had these conversations before.

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If someone is kind of starting this journey, they're hearing this podcast and thinking, Oh no, where do I start? We know sitting down and assessing what you have. But what's the step after that?

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I think it's looking at your overall cost. Honestly, it going, this is how much it's going to cost to replace all of my workstations.

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Right. If I need to drop, you know, X amount of dollars, this is how much approximately, right? How much it's going to cost to replace every single one of my workstations in my business right now.

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So, I'm just going to pick up that number and breaking it up into three, four, five, six years, maybe.

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And going, okay, what can our business do? What can we tolerate?

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Probably adding about 10, 20% to that number, just with inflation, with changes in technology.

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And then going off of that number is kind of one way that I approach it. It's also going, okay, what's our cycle 25? Okay, yep, 25 devices. You know, this is what it is, right?

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So that's kind of, Matthew, I'm not sure if you have done another way, but that's kind of, you know, as you said, is big picture. What is it going to cost? This is what I can tolerate.

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Whether you're on the leadership team or whether you're just, you know, the technician doing this work, having that budget and showing that budget is going to get you the most leeway because, you know, you're right, these machines are going to fail.

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You are going to have to replace them. Having that number available is going to make things just nicer to see, even if people bulk at it, even if it's not something they want to talk about, which, you know, you see occasionally, just have it ready.

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The next step is confirming that and really pushing that forward and budgeting for not just your workstations, but all of it.

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I very often hear people say we're an X organization that uses technology, not a technology organization that does X, and that's true.

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I'm sure that's how it looks, but if everything you do is run from a computer, make sure you're giving it the gravity it has.

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Because that's what you are doing both. And it's not just we have we use technology. It's we have to use technology. So give it that priority.

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I love it. Yeah.

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Thank you. I think that's a great place to end. Thank you, Matthew and Andrew for joining us today.

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If you enjoyed this podcast or you're interested in hearing us talk about hardware lifecycle that's not workstations, please reach out to us at info at cIT-net.com or head out to our website cIT-net.com slash podcast and we'll be back next week with an all new episode.