Enterprises unprepared for the 'death' of Windows 7 - report

Report claims that 43 per cent of businesses are still running on Windows 7, with the operating system entering its last 12 months of support

A number of enterprises are unprepared for Microsoft pulling the plug on Windows 7 support next year, a report has claimed.

Research from content delivery firm Kollective found that 43 per cent of enterprises in the US and the UK are still running on Microsoft's soon-to-be-unsupported operating system.

Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows 7 in January 2015, with extended support running till 14 January 2020.

Dan Vetras, CEO at Kollective, said: "With only a year to go, these findings should be a major cause for concern among the business community.

"When it came to migrating away from Windows XP, it took some large enterprises as long as three years to transfer their entire systems to the new operating system. Now, many firms will have to make the transition in less than 12 months.

"Most worrying of all is that this migration is just the first step. Once businesses are on Windows 10, they will need to continuously update their systems as part of Microsoft's new ‘Windows-as-a-service' model.

"This means distributing increasingly frequent updates across their systems - something many IT departments will find impossible due to outdated infrastructure."

Kollective claims that businesses which fail to migrate in time will be saddled with high fees for further support from Microsoft.

It claimed that enterprises with more than 10,000 terminals could be left with fees of over $1.4m (£1.1m) a year.

Kollective added that nearly one fifth of IT departments said they did not know when support for their operating system ends, with six per cent aware of the deadline but yet to start planning their migration to Windows 10.

A further 16 per cent also admitted to still running machines on the unsupported Windows XP and Vista operating systems.