How to revamp your tech in 2026

’Tis the season to finally ditch the legacy hardware in your organization, and channel your inner Oprah Winfrey to give employees upgraded tech.

A new year means new beginnings, and for some organizations—especially those relying on legacy hardware—that applies to corporate devices and other in-house technology. IT Brew caught up with a couple of IT experts to discuss how to make the upgrading process more palatable.

Leaving your legacy (tech) behind. Nicholas McKee, a practice director at IT company Park Place Technologies, told IT Brew that for some organizations the cost of replacing outdated technology is too high for their current budgets.

“IT has always probably had the biggest budget constraints across the board when it comes to spending money,” McKee said. “A lot of teams, they make do with what they can, with what they have.”

However, McKee said, there are strong arguments for parting ways with old systems. For one, companies may need to do so to stay up-to-date with compliance mandates. Federal contractors, for example, are required to remain proactive on refreshes, and external events like the end of Windows 10 support may require some companies to upgrade for compliance purposes. AI is also speeding up tech refresh cycles.

“It’s pushing it to a point where I think we’re going to see companies that have probably gotten away without refreshing in the past, say, 10 years, they’re not going to have an option now,” McKee said.

Hiren Hasmukh, CEO and founder of IT asset management solutions provider Teqtivity, added that prolonging legacy hardware overhauls can provoke companies into rushing the process, causing an even bigger headache.

“It’s going to cost more because you have less time to negotiate with your vendors,” he said.

Legacy IT infrastructure isn’t the only thing that IT professionals need to consider swapping out. McKee said. Employee feedback may be a sign investments need to be made in corporate devices such as laptops.

“If you’ve got a lot of employees opening tickets or complaining about [the] performance of their hardware, at some point it’s probably going to get advantageous to start upgrading and looking at that,” McKee said.

Upgrades in progress. Once a company decides to upgrade legacy tech or employee devices, McKee said they should replace the technology in a “rollout” fashion.

“You would want to assess your environment, take a nice audit of everything that you have, your companies have, and maybe start on employees that have a higher compute requirement,” McKee said.

For corporate devices, he recommended replacing one device at a time (e.g., switching out all employee laptops and then focusing on corporate phones) so that companies don’t run into multiple issues simultaneously. McKee recommended organizations switch out a select group of employees’ devices first and use the practice to create a runbook, or a standardized set of instructions that can be replicated, for the process.

“Once you have that runbook established, it’s basically a rinse and repeat,” he said.

McKee suggested that security remain top-of-mind during technology resets, and that compliance requirements are met on new devices: “You definitely want to make sure that whatever you’re upgrading to has those security endpoints in place because that could be a big risk.”