14 DAY TRIAL // The world is getting ready for another Windows XP moment as Windows Server 2003 will reach its end of support in less than one year, but many companies and organizations across the world are still running it despite all security warnings.
Security experts warn that everyone should already start planning the upgrade to another platform, as the risks of staying with a server solution that’s no longer patched are enormous.
David Mayer, director of services at Insight Enterprises, explains that it’s no surprise that so many organizations are still running Windows Server 2003 because its performance was indeed really impressive.
Times have changed though, he continues, and today’s solutions come with cloud support, which is critical for server software that needs state-of-the-art stability and reliability.
Security risks increasing
Mayer warns that despite Windows Server 2003’s excellent performance, everyone needs to upgrade eventually, and Windows Server 2012 appears to have pretty much what companies would need to keep their servers up and running.
“Windows Server 2003 was really stable,” he says. “But as we move to the cloud world, there are a lot of scenarios that weren’t prevalent back then. The big one is that Windows Server 2012 is cloud-ready. The ability to do private, public and hybrid scenarios is huge.”
Staying with the current platform, as was the case of Windows XP, is a very risky decision and should not be considered an option by any company out there, Mayer explains.
“It doesn’t matter if the server itself has important data, but that 2003 server creates a potential point of intrusion,” Mayer says. “Once you allow somebody in, it becomes much easier for them.”
Windows Server 2003 unlikely to die anytime soon
Unfortunately for Microsoft, the company has all the chances in the world to get through another Windows XP moment on July 14, 2015, when it ends support for Windows Server 2003.
According to Redmond’s very own statistics, at this point there are approximately 23.8 million installations of Windows Server 2003 out there on a total of 11.9 million servers. This represents approximately 39 percent of the whole Windows Server market share.
For the sake of comparison, Windows XP currently has a market share of 23 percent in the desktop OS world, but at the time of its retirement, it was still powering nearly 27 percent of these PCs.
It remains to be seen whether Windows Server customers will acknowledge the risks of staying with an unsupported platform, but there’s no doubt that some won’t upgrade before the deadline.