The secret costs of not upgrading your hardware It’s easy to calculate the cost of new hardware or software. But there’s more to a business case than these hard costs. Delaying your upgrade cycle may save on these costs in the short term, but there are other costs that may start ballooning as your fleet ages beyond its end-of-life. Some of these costs – like the cost of a security breach or reduced productivity – are hard to quantify or predict, but that doesn’t make them any less real. Security breaches It might be possible to estimate the cost of cleaning up a network after a security breach. It’s even possible to estimate the cost of lost or stolen personal records (USD $141 in 2017, according to IBM). But it’s much harder to estimate the cost per record in terms of damage to, or reductions in, your organization’s reputation, public trust, intent to purchase or transact, decisions about investment, and so on.