I know of a case where DBA work was outsourced. Everything ran more-or-less OK until some very old hardware hosting a very old version of some mission critical software went pop. The problem was that the version was so old that no-one in the outsourced team had any experience with the particular DB platform version that was supposed to be supported. It took a long time to fix the problem and the business repercussions were not pleasant.

The thing that was overlooked was that outsourced staff are just like us. They want to get their hands on the new toys. Would you accept a job offering you the chance to work on SQL2000?

So there are hidden costs to not upgrading.

• Recruitment challenges
• Inefficiencies introduced due to context switching between versions
• Artificial restrictions on modern tool selection as new tools might not support old software
• ...etc

Another case I heard was where there was a seven figure project to upgrade a piece of hardware. One year on IT had to go cap in hand to ask for another seven figure sum to upgrade again. What had happened was the first upgrade was to the highest version that supported the legacy systems it had to interact with. Unfortunately that version went out of support within 12 months and it absolutely was a system you wouldn't want to run without support.

In short, look at the bigger picture, its not just about the cost of the system in isolation