Technology lifecycle & risk¶
The EA problem¶
Technology decays on a schedule you don't control. Vendors set end-of-life and end-of-support dates; once passed, an unremarkable component becomes a security and continuity liability. The risk is rarely the component itself — it's what depends on it. A retired database under a mission-critical application is a very different problem from the same database under a sandbox tool. The job is to see decay coming and to weigh it by blast radius.
How ArcaMira addresses it¶
The Technology page (/technology): technology grouped by vendor and lifecycle stage, so concentration and aging are visible. It carries two tabs — Risk and Radar — for the risk reporting below.
A technology page that leads with risk:
- A lifecycle banner that warns when a component is end-of-life.
- Blast radius first — the applications (and, transitively, capabilities) that run on this component, so risk is always seen in context.
- Inline-editable profile: version, vendor, lifecycle status, category, and deployment model + cloud provider (where it runs, distinct from who makes it).
Sunset Risk Intelligence. ArcaMira enriches technologies with end-of-life data (via endoflife.date) and computes:
- EOL/EOS proximity — what's past or approaching end of support.
- Procurement windows — lead time before you must act.
- Vendor concentration — how exposed you are to a single vendor.
- A sunset debt score — a roll-up of accumulated lifecycle risk.
These feed the Risk tab on the Technology page (/technology#risk) and the Intelligence hub. The Risk tab also includes a Risk Matrix — a 4×4 grid plotting impact (criticality tier) against likelihood (EOL/obsolescence band), with both axes drawn from objective data rather than self-rating, and an explicit "unscored" tray for assets that can't yet be placed honestly.
What good looks like¶
- Lifecycle status and key dates populated for the technologies under your critical applications.
- End-of-life components surfaced with their blast radius, so remediation is prioritized by impact, not by alphabetical order.
- Vendor concentration understood before it becomes a negotiating weakness or a single point of failure.
- Sunset debt trending down over time as you remediate.
A note on data sources¶
The default EOL source is endoflife.date (free, broad coverage). Enterprise-grade licensing/EOL feeds (e.g. Flexera, Snow) are a possible future paid-tier alternative via a pluggable adapter — not built today.
Related¶
- Guide: Managing technology & end-of-life
- Discipline: Impact analysis
- Discipline: Application portfolio management