Well, soon isn’t that soon, but when you are in charge of a large corporate IT rollout, 500 days isn’t that much time to organise, research and then actually deploy an entirely new operating system for the company. But that is how much time is left until Microsoft is ending official support for Windows 7, an operating system which was released nearly ten years ago.

Windows 7 is still out there

Windows 7 was released nearly 10 years ago now and while Microsoft won’t release any more versions of Windows 10, which is a three year old operating system already there still seems to be a very large percentage of businesses which are still running Windows 7 and some even Windows XP.

In a recent report from Kollective and its Star of Software report, they had been round 260 IT managers in the UK and the US asking questions about how migrations to the latest versions of Windows are usually handled.

The report did reveal some interesting statistics, Kollective found that 17% of business in the US and UK weren’t even aware that Windows 7 would lose support soon and also 33% of businesses were still running Windows XP, an operating system which came out nearly 17 years ago. Also, 24% of businesses rely on employees to maintain Windows updates for their machines, with no in house software management and 6% of businesses have no plans to move away from Windows 7.

These findings don’t bode well for cyber security, some businesses just aren’t aware of the risks and what damage can be done by using old, unsupported software.

Source: Kollective State of Software Distribution Report & ITProPortal