Adobe Flash reaches its EOL (End of Life), and if your company’s website base is around Adobe’s aging Flash Player, you are officially on your own. Flash reaches its EOL (End of Life) as of January 1st of this year (2021).
From a business perspective, you don’t have to worry that your Adobe Flash Player – dependent website will suddenly stop working, but you won’t be getting any additional security updates from here on.
Adobe Flash Security Flaws
Unfortunately, Adobe’s Flash player has security flaws. Over the years, the company has tried gamely to patch and better secure the software, but it has proved to be an impossible challenge. For every major security flaw, Adobe identifies and close, at least one new one appears to take its place.
While that certainly factors into Adobe’s decision to kill the Flash player, the simple truth is that the web has outgrown the technology. Back in the earliest days of the internet, Flash Player was well ahead of its time. It was truly groundbreaking technology that enabled webmasters to create deep, immersive experiences that weren’t possible using other technologies of the day.
Adobe Flash Player has serious competition, and in fact, the other options like HTML5 have handily surpassed Flash by most measures. That makes HTML5 hard to argue against. Not only is it more capable and optimize for the modern-day web, but it’s also more secure, which makes it safer to deploy on your company’s network.
The bottom line is that if you’re still using Adobe Flash, it’s well past time to devote resources to a redesign that will see you migrating away from it. While your site will still function, you’re putting your company at increasing risk every day you leave Adobe Flash active on your network. It’s just a matter of time before a hacker stumbles across the glaring weakness on your network and takes advantage of it. You don’t want that.
