5 Obsolete Technologies Your Office Still Runs On in 2026 (And What to Use Instead)
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Five technologies — Excel as production infrastructure, paper cheques, fax, SMS-based two-factor authentication, and RSS — persist in workplaces not because they are technically superior but because of coordination problems: abandoning them requires all parties to move simultaneously. Each section covers why the technology survives, its real risks (e.g., Public Health England losing 15,841 COVID test results due to .xls row limits; NIST SP 800-63B Revision 4 classifying SMS OTPs as 'restricted'), and pragmatic modern alternatives. The conclusion argues the right strategy is to default to modern tools while keeping a working fallback for the inevitable edge case.
Table of contents
1. Excel as production infrastructure2. The paper cheque3. The fax4. SMS as a second factor5. RSSThe patternQuestions this post answers
Why did NIST classify SMS OTP as a restricted authenticator in SP 800-63B Revision 4?
NIST's final SP 800-63B Revision 4, published in July 2025, classifies SMS and other PSTN one-time passcodes as 'restricted' authenticators because SIM swaps, port-out fraud, and relay attacks all defeat them. Organizations may still use SMS but must document a risk assessment, maintain a migration roadmap, and notify users — NIST frames continued use as risk acceptance, not a security recommendation. Teams still defaulting to SMS 2FA track the NIST migration timeline and passkey adoption on daily.dev.
Why did Public Health England lose COVID test results in Excel and how many records were affected?
Public Health England lost 15,841 positive COVID test results over eight days because files were saved in the legacy .xls format, which caps at roughly 65,000 rows. Each test result occupied several rows, so each file filled up at around 1,400 cases and further records were silently dropped — no error was raised, the data simply stopped being recorded, and contact tracers never received those cases. Developers inheriting spreadsheet-backed pipelines find migration patterns and postmortems like this on daily.dev.
Does HIPAA actually require fax for sending protected health information or is that a myth?
HIPAA does not mandate fax for protected health information. HHS permits sharing PHI by phone, fax, or email provided reasonable safeguards are in place, and OCR has confirmed that encryption is not strictly mandatory. Fax persists in healthcare primarily because of incumbency — it was already installed and already signed off — combined with a coordination problem when the receiving machine belongs to another organization's budget. Security-conscious developers navigating healthcare compliance requirements share findings like this on daily.dev.