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The end of support for Windows 7 isn’t until 2020, however, Gartner believes resellers should start preparing for the cross over to the new operating system, ‘Windows Threshold’.
Following Microsoft’s warning that it will stop providing security updates to the OS in January 2020, Gartner’s research vice president, Stephen Kleynhans, has advised organisations to start preparing now.
This is to avoid any issues, which many organisations encountered last time, after support for Windows XP ended this April.
He said in a blog post: “Microsoft recently ended support for Windows XP, and even though the end date was set in 2007 based on a life cycle support policy Microsoft introduced in 2004, many organisations were not able to completely eliminate the OS by the deadline.”
Nearly a quarter of PCs in different organisations were still running Windows XP after support ended, leaving IT staff to figure out how to secure Windows XP.
He added: “The end of support for Windows 7 will be January 2020, assuming there are no changes to its current support life cycle. While this feels like it’s a long way off, organisations must start planning now, so they can prevent a recurrence of what happened with Windows XP.”
