The date of doom of Windows Server 2003 is nearly here and Microsoft’s partners are worried that millions of customers have left themselves wide open to security breaches.
Some suppliers have more than a third of their customer base on Windows Server 2003 and will wake up and discover they are wide open to hackers..
This is of course an opportunity worth millions to solution providers but so far companies are only nibbling.
Any Server 2003 opportunity goes way beyond an upgrade and many companies will have to take on big projects. Some machines will have to be totally replaced.
Microsoft will no longer issue patches to keep outdated software protected, the risk of a security breach rises. There were 37 critical updates released in 2013 for Server 2003, an average of just more than three per month.
Most suppliers say that they don’t have customers who will not migrate, but some are still dragging their feet. Older applications run on 32-bit architecture and development for many of these applications has been discontinued.
This means that some companies are finding that they cannot run on Server 2008 or Server 2012, which feature 64-bit platforms.
This means a software upgrade which is taking time. All this is happening at a time when companies are broke and their boards will not let IT departments start new projects.
