14 DAY TRIAL // Windows XP support is coming to an end today and although the Embedded version will still live on a little bit longer, banks are urged to upgrade their ATMs to a newer OS release as soon as possible.
Even though it has recently emerged that 95 percent of the world’s ATMs are still on Windows XP, it seems that only a few have actually been upgraded to Windows 7 lately, and a new report shows that Europe is still trailing behind the United States as far as ATM upgrades are concerned.
Approximately 89 percent of the ATMs on the Old Continent are still running Windows XP, a report published by RBR and cited by ZDNet today reveals. Some have already been upgraded to Windows 7, but it’s pretty clear that many will miss the April 8 deadline and will remain on Windows XP for a few more months.
What’s more shocking is that 4 percent of the ATMs in Europe are also running Windows 2000, even though Microsoft no longer provides support for this particular OS version, so this could be an indication that Windows XP might remain the main platform for ATMs for many years from now.
The majority of banks have already made plans to upgrade from Windows XP to another platform, but it could take a little more until the transition is indeed completed. In the meantime, many are actually negotiating with Microsoft over extended Windows XP support that could keep their data secure for approximately 12 more months until they manage to upgrade.
JPMorgan is one of the large companies that are negotiating with Microsoft custom support for Windows XP, as its migration to Windows 7 is expected to complete by the end of the year. Nearly 20,000 ATMs should be moved off Windows XP as part of the transition, company officials said.
“There are certainly large enterprise customers who haven't finished their migrations yet and are purchasing custom support,” a company representative said. “The cost will depend on both the specific needs of the customer and what support they already have in place, so it's different for every customer.”
Microsoft will clearly get millions of dollars for providing Windows XP support, but it still remains to be seen how many users would actually become vulnerable to attacks without patches and security updates. Right now, 28 percent of the desktop computers worldwide are still running Windows XP.