Tomorrow begins the holiday shopping season, with a variety of Black Friday deals, a fair few of them from Microsoft.
Tomorrow also begins the 500 day countdown to Windows XP’s death.
Come April 8, 2014, Microsoft will end support for the 11-year old operating system. The software giant has already started encouraging users and businesses to upgrade to a newer, more secure OS.
Which OS, you ask?
Windows Vista is out of the question, so it’s between Windows 7 or Windows 8.
Microsoft Gold Partner Camwood believes that Windows 7 is set to become the key product for the Redmond-based company in the next few years.
“However, the main factor that should mean every company is already starting to move to Windows 7 or even 8 is the risk of a security breach. Once support for XP is discontinued, enterprises running XP will probably become more susceptible to cyberattack or system meltdown,”
said Kevin Gemmel, the head of professional services at Camwood.
“If Windows XP is still being run in your environment and you feel that migration will not be complete by April 8, 2014, or you haven’t begun migration yet, Microsoft is eager to help.”
Gemmel believes that Windows XP’s end as a supported operating system from Microsoft will be a crucial moment for a lot of businesses that are still relying on the OS, but a move to a newer version of Windows is nevertheless, absolutely necessary, considering the enormous security risks.
“The end of XP support is a potential time bomb, and the clock is ticking. With all the potential compatibility and security issues looming from legacy systems, businesses need to understand migration is a necessary step to secure their valuable data,”
Gemmel concluded.
All said and done, 11 years is still a considerable amount of time for an operating system.
When you consider that mainstream computing itself is just around a couple of decades old, for an OS to be there half that time is a testament to the stability and longevity of Windows XP.
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