Windows Server 2003 to reach EOS in July 2015

Feb 16, 2015 13:01 GMT  ·  By

After Windows XP, which officially reached end of support on April 8, 2014, another Windows version is getting ready to go dark, this time affecting businesses and organizations in a much more dramatic way.

Windows Server 2003 will no longer receive updates and improvements as of July 15, 2015, and since this is quite a critical milestone for many companies out there, it's no surprise that it's also one of the moments when Microsoft could make a fortune by simply providing updates only to paying customers.

Basically, starting mid-July, Microsoft will no longer provide updates to all Windows Server 2003 customers, but only to those who agree to pay a yearly fee. How much does custom support for Windows 2003 cost? you might ask.

According to Paul DeGroot, principal consultant with the independent Microsoft licensing consultancy Pica Communications, that would be no less than $600 (€525) for the first year. This price could double after the first year and triple after another, so in three years' time, a company with 5,000 licenses would have to pay no less than $21 million (€18.4 million) to get customer support, he said.

The much more affordable way

Companies that do not want to pay millions of dollars to keep Windows Server 2003 patched after end of support only have to upgrade their computers to a newer server of the operating system, but the process must be completed by July.

Of course, there's also the second and the most dangerous option to leave Windows Server 2003 running on computers without any other patches, but that obviously increases the risks of getting hacked when new vulnerabilities in the operating system are found.

And yet, that's very likely to happen because not all Windows Server 2003 customers plan to upgrade.

WS 2003 is thus expected to have a fate similar to that of Windows XP, as the 14-year-old desktop operating system is still running on nearly 18 percent of the world's PCs despite the fact that it no longer receives updates since April last year.