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Are you ready for Microsoft's next round of end of life support?

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[fa icon="pencil'] Posted by Mike Garner [fa icon="calendar"] April 17, 2019

Here at Lewan we believe in supporting the lifecycle of a solution from early concept through retirement from your environment. While much of our work is about helping you create a vision and adopt what is new, it’s also our job to keep tabs on what is old and soon to be unsupported.

Microsoft has several widely deployed products reaching their Extended Support End Date (End of Life or EOL). This means: 

There will be no new security updates, non-security updates, free or paid assisted support options or online technical content updates.

Continuing to run these systems would represent a significant threat to your business as they will be without support and become an increasingly attractive target for hackers.

Here are a few of some familiar Microsoft products that are about to lose support:

  • SQL Server 2008, 2008 R2 is EOL July 2019
  • Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 is EOL January 2020
  • Exchange Server 2010 is EOL January 2020
  • Windows 7 is EOL January 2020
  • SharePoint Server 2010 is EOL October 2020

You can see the whole list here for Microsoft End of Life 2019 and here for Microsoft End of Life 2020.

If you’re like most of the clients I talk to daily, you’ve probably got some of these products running in your environment today. Now is the time to begin planning your migration path. There are many factors to consider and multiple avenues to migrating off of these systems.

Consider some of the following:

  • Is now the time to consider cloud-based applications and/or infrastructure?
    • Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint are great candidates to move to Office 365 and let you permanently abandon the rat race of trying to stay current with new releases.
    • If your upgrade path requires significant hardware purchases, is it time to consider a hosted model with more scalability, OpEx, or elimination of running a costly, complex datacenter?
  • Will the move to newer operating systems or applications require new or additional hardware? Laptops/desktops running Windows 7 probably won’t be the best platform for Windows 10 and upgrading numerous Windows Server 2008 instances to 2012/2016/2019 may require significant increases to compute and RAM.
  • Have you considered impacts to monitoring, anti-malware, and/or data protection tools that may be required?
  • Changes to server operating systems and SQL Server versions require exhaustive inventorying of the applications – and maybe even upgrades to the application versions themselves. Plan enough time to give your business a stress-free migration.
  • What training might be required for your IT staff or end users with changes to platforms, versions and applications?

As we approach the end of the year, expect lead times on new servers, laptops and desktops to increase in response to worldwide refresh needs. Also, expect consulting help to become constrained with these initiatives and the usual year-end busy season for IT projects.

As you can see, the upgrade could be relatively straightforward…OR involve the complexity of a business-wide application planning and cloud migration strategy or a wholesale refresh of all laptops/desktops in your business.

Regardless of the path that is right for you, Lewan has the experts to help design the solution, manage the entire project, architect new on premises or cloud infrastructures, support migrations, and quarterback large logistical challenges for you. Contact Us today to learn more about how we can help make this an easy upgrade for you.

Lewan is a Microsoft Silver Partner, a Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) and Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP).

Topics: Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Azure

Mike Garner
Written by Mike Garner

Mike is Lewan's Director of Consulting Services.

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