The countdown has started, Saturday marks only 500 days until Microsoft stops supporting the world’s most popular operating system, Windows 7 according to a new study.
This could cause major security concerns for companies as Microsoft will stop providing vital security updates to the Windows 7 system by Janruary 2020, according to a study from Kollective, a content delivery company
However, many corporate IT departments, 66 per cent in fact, don’t see moving away from Windows 7 as a priority, the report stated.
Of the 260 IT decision makers surveyed in the U.S. and U.K., 43 per cent are still running on Windows 7 with only one fifth of the companies having made the move to Windows 10.
Another 6 per cent don’t even plan to make the change.
While 500 days may seem like a long time, Jon O’Connor, solution architect at Kollective said in the report that it took many businesses up to three years to move from XP to Windows 7 and he predicts a similar timeline for the move to Windows 10
In fact more than a quarter of companies surveyed said it needs to allow at least a month to roll out the new operating system and security updates.
O’Connor suggests the best strategy is to allow the updates to roll out automatically but “our research suggests that many businesses simply don’t have the network infrastructure needed to achieve this simultaneous update.” Many will take months or years to migrate entire systems he said.
The study also found that 16 per cent of companies still use even older systems like Vista and XP.
With all this in mind O’Connor suggests that companies start switching operating systems to get ahead of the countdown to the Windows 7 ‘doomsday’.