BANGALORE: The end of Windows 7 support seems far away, but the time between when the next version of Windows (currently codenamed “Windows Threshold”) may ship, and support for Windows 7 will end, is about the same timeframe as from when Windows XP support ended.

In today’s blog post, Stephen Kleynhans, Research Vice-President at Gartner, says CIOs and endpoint computing managers should get ahead of the game and avoid the issues many organizations encountered last time.

Kleynhans said: 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 organizations were not able to completely eliminate the OS by the deadline. Nearly a quarter of PCs in organizations were still running Windows XP after support ended, leaving IT to figure out how to secure Windows XP and/or find funding to do so.

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, organizations must start planning now, so they can prevent a recurrence of what happened with Windows XP.

The good news is that improvements to Windows 8 help enable adoption. Microsoft has moved to a more fluid approach to releasing and updating Windows. In the 18 months since its release, Windows 8 has had two significant updates, and we expect more during the next year.

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