As one of the biggest success stories for Microsoft, Windows XP has millions of customers globally as well as in India. But, what goes up, must come down and Microsoft’s Windows XP has about five months of support left, this means that systems running on XP will be hugely vulnerable to cyber attacks and malware after the support is gone.
As a result, today there are many financial institutions as well as governments which could not fathom this and hence are in a tight spot. Is your enterprise prepared to handle Windows XP demise? Here is what you should know.
Come April 8, 2014 and any enterprise, small or big, organization or government agency will find it very difficult to run its applications and business activities on Windows XP as Microsoft is pulling the service plug off and hence machines running on Windows XP will have no service support from Microsoft. So, what is this service and support anyway?
In an internet driven world, everything is connected to the world wide web and an operating systems sits right at the helm of it all. This is where most of the action happens and all the information comes via an operating system such as Windows XP. Microsoft provides specific service to its operating systems in the form of regular updates on application usage and protecting the systems from opening any vulnerabilities for potential virus attacks. This is the basic level of protection that binds everything on to a system. This service and support for XP will go by April 8th, 2014.
However, as expressed by experts, it is quite unlikely that every device running on Windows XP will be transitioned to a modern operating system in time for the deadline. So what are the scenarios? There could be three such scenarios that can possibly help enterprise develop and formulate their XP migration strategy.
First scenario would be to look for funds and see if upgrading to a latest Microsoft operating system can be done. Second scenario can be to look towards virtualization and understand what are some of the applications that an organizations can possibly virtualise.
This way an organization can reduce the number of systems it actually needs and go for further upgradation rest of the XP machines can simply sit with no access to network. This way there can be no harm done to Windows XP via the Internet.
And thirdly, organizations will now have an option look for other operating systems such as Linux which are relatively cheaper to maintain and manage.
Market experts also say that not all organizations will transfer to a safe operating system by the deadline. And especially most of the governments have a tendency to adapt new technology at their own pace.
As Windows XP nears its official death, one thing is for sure, there can be no single point solution to this challenge but the best way to migrate will depend on each clearly understanding each of the organization’s needs, requirements and than creating specific migration plan, well ahead of the deadline.
