Today, however, these same machines are quietly seated in people’s homes, being used in some cases by more than one person, only protected by simple home broadband routers. Yet unlike now, many of those affected machines were more safely positioned behind corporate firewalls, in corporate offices, hospitals and other business premises. Some of us, still scarred from the Wannacry attack of 2017 which targeted vulnerable Windows machines, will remember the damage unpatched machines can have on a business or service like the UK NHS. With an increased surge in Ransomware in 2020 and phishing attacks, targeted explicitly at home-workers, the need to protect these devices and our employees have increased. The importance to keep these, now remote Windows 7 machines patched and up to date has also never been so important. This delay in migrations might be one reason why today, NetMarketshare report that 23% of desktops are still running Windows 7. IT departments have been consumed with work from home (WFH) strategies during the pandemic, and instead of migrating machines, one office at a time, are left trying to work out how to migrate one machine, one home at a time. Today, millions of Windows 7 devices are now located in people’s homes and have not been migrated. Many thought there would be time to get things done in 2020 – but then we were all faced with a pandemic. The ESU program was designed to give organizations still on Windows 7 time to migrate – including time to complete their testing, and time to deploy at a pace suitable for the business. With millions of business line applications and integrated peripherals, the migration to Windows 10 takes considerable time, effort and testing.

Today the ESU program has proven to be an essential offering to many organizations who were still running Windows 7, but perhaps not in the way they had imagined.

Available as a one-year SKU, Microsoft would continue to patch known vulnerabilities for around $50 per device, depending on the version of Windows used (Windows E3 was about half that price and Windows E5 was free for year one).

For those organizations not able to migrate off the 11-year-old OS, Microsoft offered to continue supporting these desktops through the Extended Security Update (ESU) program. We all know that Windows 7 went end of life on Jan 14 th, 2020. At the time Netmarketshare reported that around 30% of desktops were still running Windows 7. The Clock Keeps Ticking and Costs are Just about to Double!

Risk ii windows 7