XP delay gives time to consider wider upgrade options

The great stand-off has ended – for a short period at least – in a victory for the stubbornly large army of Microsoft XP users. The company has stepped back from the brink of its April deadline on calling a halt to providing anti-malware support for the classic PC operating system. That support, which would have cast existing users adrift and increasingly open to attack by hackers using sophisticated hacking tools, is now to continue through to July 14^th, 2015, the company has announced. 

That means they will at least get a minimum of protection to their IT infrastructures, but it does not mean they can relax. It is, after all, only an 18 month stay of execution. The axe is still bound to fall.

What it might do, however, is give them a little more breathing time on any decision making processes they are currently undertaking. This is particularly relevant when it comes to the need to consider more radical, and therefore more concerning options to simply upgrading to Microsoft’s Windows 7.

Slightly more radical would be to go for a server-based delivery of virtualised Windows 7 using thin clients instead of PCs, while this can be taken a step further to use cloud-delivered virtualised Win 7 instances to any type of device, anywhere the cloud can be accessed.

And once the term `any kind of device’ is used that raises the issue of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) as an alternative. Another 18 months could be sufficient time for many businesses to reconsider how IT resources can benefit their operations in future and, for example, see that while a complete re-jig of the entire applications portfolio to fully exploit the potential of modern tablets and smartphones, a combination of cloud delivered instances of their existing applications and additional tablet-based apps might make considerable sense.

So this breathing space offered by Microsoft is good, but also represents a time when XP-using businesses should put accelerate their options planning efforts, not feel they can relax again.

That view is shared by IT service management company, FrontRange, which has issued a warning that organisations still in the process of undertaking migration from XP should not let the news influence migration projects.   

“When Microsoft originally announced that security patch support for Windows XP would end this April, the hope was to force all customers off Windows XP and at the same time increase the adoption rate of Windows 8,” said Holger Weeres, Client Management ‎Product Director at FrontRange. “After an initial quick decline of XP and a growing market share of Windows 7, this trend slowed down significantly.” He pointed to the  Desktop Operating System Marketshare Survey by NetmarketShare, which shows XP still with 28.98 percent and Windows 7 with 47.52 percent. This, he suggested, shows that any switch has almost ground to a halt over the last few months.  In addition, he suggested Windows 8 is struggling, at 3.6 percent share, with most larger companies upgrading their XP machines slowly to Windows 7.  Smaller businesses often wait for the hardware to be replaced over time with newer hardware, already preloaded with Windows 8.

“The announcement this week for extended XP support shows what was known all along.  Customers are neither willing or able to follow the rapid OS release cycles of Microsoft.  For many, Windows XP is still a proven and well-working corporate platform, and the scale of the upgrade is so vast that  many large organisations are struggling to replace all of their Windows XP machines in the imposed timeframe.  This is complicated by the fact that Windows 7 has higher processor and other hardware requirements than XP, so it’s by no means a simple upgrade.  With so many firms still relying on XP, Microsoft has been left with little choice but to continue to issue security fixes way beyond its original cut off date.

“Most of our customers have upgraded from XP across the board as we make it relatively easy for them to get that done, , but there remain applications and departments at some businesses for which migration to a new OS is deemed as being too involved and laborious with some tool sets.  Organisations should not be complacent following the latest news of extended security support for XP.  Security is perhaps the leading operational concern for businesses, but this does not mean that XP is now any safer an option, as the support announced is relatively limited.  Of course OS migration is not as simple as flicking a switch, but it is easier than perhaps some organisations may realise, provided there is scope within deployments for centralised control.”       

Where the extra time may prove useful, however, is in giving businesses a breathing space in which to evaluate exactly what environment they want to migrate to, especially if they are looking to use the necessity of moving from XP to enhance or develop the range of applications and services they want to add to their current operations.