System status: nominal

The Deadline You Can See Coming Is Never The One That Gets You

Y2K was fine because a very large number of people spent three years quietly making it fine. The deadlines that actually catch a business out are the ones nobody reports: a version that stops receiving updates, a certificate that lapses, a standard that adds a requirement on its own timetable.

The deadlines that have your name on them

• Software and equipment that stops receiving security updates on a published date, which is a date you can plan around the moment somebody writes it down.
• Certificates and domain renewals that lapse quietly and take a service down with them on a Sunday.
• A standard your customers or your insurer hold you to, which adds requirements when it decides to rather than when it suits you.
• CMMC, if you sell into the defense supply chain, which runs to a phased timetable that does not care when you started looking at it.

What actually happened

The planes stayed up

Because a very large number of people had spent three years going through code line by line. The quiet outcome was the expensive one, and it was worth every penny.

Then everybody decided it had been a fuss about nothing

Which is what success looks like from the outside, and it is the reason the next boring deadline is harder to get funded than the last one.

The work never stopped

Support dates, certificates, standards. Y2K was one date that applied to everybody at once. These are hundreds of dates that apply to you specifically, which makes them easier to miss and cheaper to fix.

How this goes

1. We build the list

Every piece of software and equipment you run, with the date its support ends against it. Most businesses have never seen this on one page.

2. It gets sorted by date

What lands this year, what lands next year, and what you can genuinely leave alone. The list is yours whatever you decide to do with it.

3. The dates go in a calendar

One that belongs to the business rather than to a person, so the next one is a scheduled purchase instead of an emergency.