Got a Windows XP end-of-life plan? Neither does anyone else

Re: Company Plan

Like the great crash of 1929 there will one day be a great explosion/implosion in IT. From the ashes there will emerge a new and more streamlined IT entity.

At the moment they keep piling bricks on what is becoming a very insecure foundation, this will become too heavy and topple into an abyss. Remove the rubble and start again.

'helluva' lotta rubbish!

Assumption is the mother of all f*uck-ups @Andy Prough...

How much do you know about OS software under the hood? There are legacy apps tied to legacy hardware such as medical devices at hospitals and engineering equipment at engineering firms, that simply will not work in Win7 or 8 without modification. Your 3 point plan is like government sponsored oversimplification!

Re: My plan?

My main workstation at home is about five years old and as it was upgraded to 4GB not too long after it was purchased, has run Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 just fine.

A firewall will not help you protect against a vulnerability in a core component which is exposed via internet connecting software to the outside world. Flash, I'm looking at you...

Re: My plan?

@Yet Another Anonymous Coward: I assume you aren't old enough to have been around when NT4 went EOL. Many companies tried precisely that strategy, because heck it probably won't matter. And pretty much every one of them ended up spending a lot more trying to bail themselves out of the hole they dug themselves into when things started to go wrong than they ever would had they taken a considered and planned approach.

Re: "Got a Windows XP end-of-life plan?"

If you're talking about a home PC, that sounds fine (my Win2k box recently quit after >10 years faithful service). But as a corporate strategy, it won't survive any risk assessment.

Re: "I will be able to find a way to install it on whatever hardware is on the market"

I sincerely hope you do, but I don't think you will.

My original, holographed XP Windows cannot install on today's hardware, it refuses to complete the install process and blue screens every time I try.

If I do want to install on modern hardware, I need an XP SP2 image. That will probably last a few more years, at which point only an XP SP3 image will be able to install on hardware after, say, 2020, for a few more years.

So I'm guessing that, after 2025, you will be forced to install something else whether you like it or not.

Of course, you should probably be able to get XP running in a VM far longer than that - but users don't have to stay in a VM, now do they ?

Re: "Got a Windows XP end-of-life plan?"

@Turtle: "And by the way, because Microsoft is going to stop supporting XP, does that mean that anti-virus companies are going to stop supporting it? Most of the support that I need for XP - and I don't need much - is supplies by vendors other than Microsoft."

Probably. Once a version of Windows goes EOL it's not long before application and tool vendors start to drop support to. Given the size of the XP user base, I'd imagine many (though probably not all) AV vendors will probably keep support around for maybe a year or so past XP EOL, but it certainly won't be forever.

Exactly!

in due course there will be frustration at the reliability (or not) of those solutions and training gaps and the fact that different and incompatible solutions are used in various departments. Some bright spark will say "why don't we hire someone to take charge of this chaos". A couple of hiring cycles and a smidgen of empire building later later and the result will be indistinguishable from the much reviled It dept of old.

And some groaning user will exclaim "there must be a way that involves less red tape"...

Re: Bring your own app

BYOA and it is back to 1980, a Visicalc & mainframes re-run.

Re: I EOLed Redmond with the Y2K-thingie.

It sounds like you're saying "my clients now have to pay me more since I forced them off MS OSs." I'm sure that's good for you, but not for your clients.

Re: Business Critical apps

There is no "fixing" required, all Win7 software runs fine and Olaf Officedrohne can effectively use Win8 after 30min of "electrical enhanced" or 8h of normal training. Same amount of time he needs for a new software of any kind.

"Klick on the shiny green icon Olaf" <Bzzt> "The Green one, Olaf"...

Re: Advice on software from a banker?

If the proprietary software doesn't work with 7/8 its been time to review IT in the practice since before 2009. All sensible printers should be fine. New hardware costs less than a days pay for a GP - the main cost is the several days work for migration and training if staff are used to well out of date systems.

Re: Advice on software from a banker?

@Charlie Clark: The questions you raise are the important ones, yet the ones that most people here seem to have completely missed. It's not about "Oh I won't get malware because of X, Y and Z", that's only a minor side-effect of XP's EOL. Continuity of business means you need a plan of how things are going to work if, for example, you end up having to buy new PCs, which you won't be able to get XP on and may never get drivers for either. Likewise if some new piece of software you need comes out that also drops support for XP and suddenly you find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Failing to have a proper strategy in place to migrate away from XP in business (whether to another version of Windows or something else entirely) is incredibly foolish. Burying your head in the sand and pretending it's all fine usually is.

Re: "those that have operated under the radar of IT"

@Pascal Monett: It's incredibly stupid. Yet the number of businesses out there that function because "Bob in accounting made a really useful spreadsheet" is higher than most IT pros would care to admit. It's frightening how quickly and deeply business processes can become dependent upon such "user created applications." If IT folk aren't even aware of their existence, and often they aren't because users don't want IT "interfering", then these can become a potentially massive liability.

Re: Marketing scare mongery

Tezfair said: "I have one customer that still uses Server 2000. It amazes me that its not died, but it still works, its not exposed to the internet, so where's the problem?"

Does any of these boxes permit access to removable storage (CD, USB, whatever)?

They do? There's one problem right away then.

But don't let it bother your cozy little non-Inernet-facing world.

Re: Marketing scare mongery

@Tezfair: "I have one customer that still uses Server 2000. It amazes me that its not died, but it still works, its not exposed to the internet, so where's the problem?"

If you know that it can easily be replaced by a currently supported OS, probably not much. If you have no plan whatsoever, and no real idea of what work will be involved if you had to replace it with something new tomorrow due to a catastrophic failure, then the problem ought to be blindingly obvious.

Re: Windows 8

Hmmm, that's interesting to know.

Re: Bring your own app (software as service)?

Yes and quite a few. I.e DATEV for online bookkeeping/taxes gets all the bills of most small/medium companies in germany. Since the 1980s. It is considered trustworthy (doing nothing else). And why not? Most smaller companies do not have data important enough that a "cloud provider" would gain enough from selling it to compensate the risks. Example:

A carpenter "around the corner" here is big enough to have two secretaries and a few extra computers as well as a few notebooks for the "Bauleiter" (Master craftsman) on-site. The use Datev for tax and salary like many others and they could easily replace their server with a cloud solution. Actually that might well be faster/more reliable (and no more costly) than the 2Mbit leased line they use now.