As many of you are likely aware, Adobe made the decision some time ago to decommission their popular Flash Player at the end of 2020. You may be wondering how this affects you as a SAS customer… and the short answer is that for anyone leveraging SAS tools or solutions which make use of Flash, the repercussions may be keenly felt and certainly bear some consideration. SAS has been working diligently for some time to ensure that business continuity for our customers remains uninterrupted as best as possible. You can find an overview of the situation and some possible solutions here. There are a few options which we want to share.
As SAS continues to evolve towards a cloud-driven, agile, scalable paradigm, upgrading to the Viya framework is the easiest way to avoid most Flash-related issues. In truth, the business benefits of Viya extend far beyond addressing Flash end-of-life – there are many more advantages to evolving your analytical practice as SAS does as well. To learn more about Viya and what it can do for your business, please feel free to visit the SAS Viya website.
A migration of this size and scale may not always be feasible. As A SAS 9.4 customer, you also have options to help address the Flash situation by simply upgrading to the M7 release which went live in August. In addition to many security enhancements and operating system support, the M7 update explicitly addresses Flash dependencies by removing them from your SAS environment. To learn more about the changes which M7 supports, have a look at this post which details the changes included in the M7 release in detail. To assist you with your upgrade, you can leverage the System Evaluation Tool within the free SAS 9 Content Assessment Application. Learn more about how it helps you upgrade in place smoothly at this link. You’ll find a video demonstration link in the “When do I use it?” section of the article.
SAS takes our responsibility to support our customers very seriously and these steps will help ensure continuity of business as best as possible. This link will provide you with guidance to remove the use of Adobe Flash from your SAS environment. In addition, our ‘virtual’ door is always open, so please do reach out to your SAS representatives for more assistance, we’re ready to help.
