The Top 5 Risks of Using Obsolete and Unsupported Software

Obsolete and unsupported software is no longer just a technical burden. It’s a business liability. In today’s hyper-connected and AI-powered cloud era, every unpatched vulnerability, unsupported module, or outdated interface becomes a potential breach point, cost sink, or compliance failure. And with global spending on cloud infrastructure services projected to hit $723 billion by 2025, organizations still running legacy workloads are losing ground fast.

For App Owners in professional services, where customer SLAs, audit trails, and uptime expectations are non-negotiable, outdated systems don’t just underperform; they undermine growth, resilience, and profitability.

This blog explores the top five risks of continuing to operate unsupported and obsolete systems, and how a modern platform like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) can help you migrate once, modernize right, and win more.

1. Security & Vulnerability Exposure

Running obsolete or unsupported software drastically increases your exposure to security risks. These systems often lack the capacity for modern defenses, and attackers know it.

Exponential Vulnerability Growth in 2025

• In 2025, over 21,500 new CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) were disclosed, with ~38% rated High or Critical.
• Attackers exploited 161 distinct vulnerabilities in H1 2025, some outside the publicly recognized catalog, highlighting how quickly new threats emerge and are weaponized.
• Legacy systems tend to “age poorly” in terms of vulnerability. Research suggests that almost 70% of applications have at least one vulnerability after 5 years in production.

These figures mean that remaining on outdated platforms not only gives attackers more “doors” to open; it gives them more tools and time to breach.

The Financial & Operational Fallout

When vulnerabilities are exploited, the costs are steep:

• The IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2024 report places the average global breach cost at USD 4.88 million.
• In regulated sectors like financial services, the costs run higher: USD 6.08 million on average per breach.
• Exploits targeting outdated OS or unsupported software versions (such as legacy Windows variants) remain common. In Q1 2025, attackers increased use of Windows-based exploits year-over-year.

From lost revenue to legal exposure to reputational damage, vulnerabilities in outdated systems do more than threaten data. They threaten the very continuity of the business.

Why Legacy Systems Are “Soft Targets”

• No patch support = no defense: Unsupported software often receives no security updates, leaving known flaws unmitigated.
• Tooling incompatibility: Modern IDS/IPS, EDR, agent-based defensive tools may not support legacy platforms.
• Lack of visibility: Logging, monitoring, or anomaly detection may not be built in or compatible, making it harder to detect attacks or lateral movement.
• Supply chain exposure: Legacy systems often rely on old libraries, dependencies, or integrations that further widen the attack surface.

2. Operational Inefficiencies & Hidden Risks

Obsolete software isn’t just a security risk. It quietly sabotages your organization’s operational efficiency. For many organizations still relying on legacy systems, the impact is invisible… until it isn’t.

Legacy Waste Adds Up Fast

Maintaining legacy systems siphons resources from innovation and performance:

• According to Gartner, businesses still spend 60%–80% of IT budgets on legacy system maintenance, diverting funds away from digital transformation and modernization efforts.
• In a 2024 Rackspace survey, 71% of IT leaders said legacy tech is slowing innovation and collaboration across departments.
• Companies waste an estimated $85 billion annually in maintaining outdated IT systems that deliver diminishing returns.

You’re Paying for Features You Don’t Use

Legacy systems are often bloated with obsolete functionality, and even when they work, their architecture limits efficiency:

• Manual workflows that could be automated
• Batch processing delays in environments that need real-time agility
• Integration nightmares with modern cloud platforms and APIs

These inefficiencies translate to longer time-to-insight, higher error rates, more human overhead, and ultimately, poorer decision-making.

Inflexibility Hampers Growth

Most legacy systems weren’t built for the scale, elasticity, or connectivity required by today’s digital economy. As a result:

• Scaling infrastructure is slow and expensive.
• Supporting new data formats, APIs, or devices requires custom workarounds.
• Expanding to new markets or business models is riskier and more costly.

According to a recept report, organizations using outdated infrastructure take 45% longer to deploy new digital initiatives, and face 38% higher failure rates.

3. Regulatory Compliance Risks

When outdated systems fail, regulators notice.

Organizations that continue to operate with obsolete or unsupported software risk falling out of compliance with stringent regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, SOX, PCI DSS, and industry-specific mandates like 21 CFR Part 11 (for life sciences). These frameworks frequently require robust controls for data protection, encryption, access logging, and incident response; features rarely found in older platforms without significant (and costly) retrofitting.

For example, GDPR Article 32 mandates “appropriate technical and organizational measures” to ensure ongoing confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems and services. Unsupported legacy software, often unable to receive patches or provide audit trails, directly violates these requirements.

A 2024 report by Deloitte found that 67% of compliance leaders lack confidence in their organization’s ability to monitor all regulatory obligations across jurisdictions. This uncertainty is magnified when software systems don’t meet modern control standards.

Additionally, IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report reveals that organizations with high levels of system complexity, often caused by outdated platforms and manual compliance workarounds, faced average breach costs of $5.28 million, compared to $3.92 million for modernized environments.

In highly regulated sectors like finance, pharma, healthcare, and logistics, the consequences extend beyond fines: license revocations, product recalls, or public trust erosion can all stem from avoidable software risks.

4. Data Loss, Downtime, and the Real Cost of Disruption

When you’re running outdated or unsupported software, it’s not just a matter of inconvenience. It’s a matter of resilience, recoverability, and revenue. Legacy systems are more prone to failure, harder to restore, and more expensive to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.

Outages Are More Likely and More Costly

Legacy environments typically lack modern backup, high availability, and disaster recovery capabilities. When systems fail, organizations face crippling downtime:

• According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute, or more than $336,000 per hour, and this figure spikes in regulated industries or customer-facing sectors.
• A survey revealed that 70% of outages in the past 24 months were preventable, often caused by aging or unsupported IT infrastructure.
• In financial services, downtime during trading or transactional windows can result in millions in lost revenue per incident.

The Long-Tail Impact of Data Loss

Legacy systems often use outdated storage formats or proprietary structures, making data harder to back up, harder to access, and harder to migrate:

• 44% of CIOs in a 2025 report said legacy systems made it difficult to perform consistent backups or test disaster recovery protocols.
• Data recovery from outdated systems can take 3x longer than modern cloud-native solutions, increasing the risk of permanent data loss or compliance penalties.

Systemic Risk from Unpredictable Failures

Legacy software may contain undocumented customizations, abandoned dependencies, and unsupported hardware integrations. When one part breaks, the cascading failure can impact multiple critical business processes:

• A 2025 resiliency report found that organizations running EOL (end-of-life) infrastructure are 62% more likely to experience multi-system failure during a critical incident.

Modern cloud platforms like OCI provide built-in high availability, automated failover, real-time data replication, and integrated backup, reducing the risk of these costly disruptions and ensuring recovery SLAs that legacy systems simply can’t match.

5. Strategic Misalignment and Innovation Stagnation

When your core IT systems are outdated, your business doesn’t just fall behind on performance. It stalls out on innovation. Obsolete software prevents your teams from adopting new technologies, integrating with cloud-native tools, and aligning with your broader digital transformation strategy.

Legacy Systems Block Future-Proofing

Innovation requires agility, but legacy software is often:

• Hard-coded and customized beyond recognition
• Built for fixed capacity and static workloads
• Incompatible with AI, automation, or data-driven architectures

According to Accenture’s 2025 Pulse Survey, 67% of CIOs report that legacy tech is the biggest barrier to achieving their digital transformation goals, especially when it comes to AI, cybersecurity, and customer-facing modernization.

You’re Spending More and Getting Less

Maintaining legacy infrastructure is deceptively expensive:

• Older systems require specialized skills that are increasingly rare and costly.
• Software patches (if still available) often require manual intervention and create integration risk.
• Operational costs increase every year due to rising energy consumption, cooling needs, and hardware replacement cycles.

A 2025 Deloitte analysis found that companies maintaining legacy IT spend between 60–80% of their total IT budget just keeping the lights on, leaving little room for innovation.

OCI Helps Enterprises Align for the Future

Modernizing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure empowers organizations to shift from reactive to proactive IT:

• Cloud-native services like Oracle Autonomous Database, AI/ML integration, and serverless compute help unlock new products and services.
• Integrated governance and FinOps tools give IT and finance leaders shared control over cost, performance, and compliance.
• OCI’s hybrid and multi-cloud support allows enterprises to incrementally modernize, rather than “rip and replace.”

By transitioning to a fully supported, future-ready platform, you eliminate the innovation bottlenecks caused by legacy software, and unlock a more strategic, agile, and secure path forward.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Is it always risky to keep legacy software in place?
   Yes, while some legacy systems may still function, they typically expose organizations to security, compliance, and performance risks due to lack of updates, patching, and compatibility with modern tools.
2. Can we modernize without fully replacing legacy systems?
   Absolutely. Solutions like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) enable hybrid modernization strategies, migrating in phases or integrating cloud-native services around your core systems.
3. How do I calculate the real cost of maintaining outdated software?
   Use TCO frameworks that factor in licensing, infrastructure, support, downtime, and opportunity cost. According to Deloitte, 60–80% of IT budgets often go toward maintenance of legacy systems.
4. What’s the first step toward modernization?
   Start with an IT health assessment. Identify unsupported platforms, security gaps, integration roadblocks, and map out a migration path to supported cloud environments like OCI.