Your warranty expired in 2021, you just don't know it yet
Nobody tracks hardware cover. Not the vendor, not the partner, and, statistically, not you.
We once worked through a client's renewal workbook, a well-run, multi-branch business with a competent IT team, and found three production hosts and a storage array whose support cover had lapsed almost three years earlier. Not missed by days. Years. The entries were right there in the sheet, marked "expired", carried forward file after file, resolved by no one.
This is completely normal, and it's worth understanding why. Software renewals announce themselves, things stop working, portals nag, invoices arrive. Warranties are silent. The device keeps running exactly as before, so the lapse costs nothing today. The bill arrives on the day the hardware fails: no vendor support, no advance replacement, and a typical three-to-four-week turnaround to source and ship a replacement. For a core switch, a host or, worst of all, the backup appliance, that's not an inconvenience. That's the business offline.
The tracking gap is structural. Vendors don't chase you: an expired warranty is a future hardware sale. Partners see only the slice of your estate they supplied, one client we worked with counted fourteen separate partners across his environment, each blind to the other thirteen. And internally, warranty dates live in purchase emails and PDF packing lists from four years ago, tagged to serial numbers nobody has reconciled since installation.
The end-of-life dimension makes it sharper. Once a device is EOL, there are no more firmware releases, which in a rising-cybercrime environment means it isn't just unsupported, it's unpatchable. Cover for it can't be bought at any price; it has to be replaced, and replacement is a sixteen-week project, not a purchase order.
The fix: every device on the estate with its service tag, cover end-date and EOL status in one tracked list, owned by a named person, with the replace-or-renew decision forced five months out. It's not sophisticated. It's just never been anyone's job. Renewals360 makes it the platform's job, including telling you, today, which of your devices already crossed the line.