Hi Manglu,
Thank you for this message. From a Ping|ForgeRock perspective I can provide some background. I certainly want to encourage other customers to provide their points of view as well on this topic.
A quarterly release cadence for Identity Gateway helps customers stay within their security SLAs. There is a steady flow of security vulnerabilities flagged in 3rd party libraries (although often not exploitable in IG) and a regular train is a way to keep you up-to-date. Note that we introduced drop-in-upgrade to move from 2023.3 to any later 2023.x release without the need to change configuration, just drop in the software. This only works 2023.x to 2023.y, not between major version upgrades.
At this point, IG 2024.3, IG 2023.11 and IG 7.2 are supported versions. In particular, IG 7.2 is still supported until February 2025 with the option to ELS (extended limited support) to 2027.
You may consider the last minor release of a major branch (i.e. year since calendar versioning) a LTS (long-term support) release. 2023.11 is supported until 2026 with ELS to 2028. 2024.11/2024.12 will be supported until 2027 with ELS until 2029. And so forth.
If you can do 1 upgrade a year, I would recommend to move to an LTS release. This would always be the last release of a year, i.e. 2023.11, 2024.last, etc.
It is a question of balance between your security SLA, appetite for new functionality and capacity to upgrade. Keen to hear what others think.
For EOL policy, dates and versions, see ForgeRock Product Support Lifecycle Policy | IG and Agents
Best Regards,
Joachim Andres
Product Manager, Ping Identity