On July 14 Microsoft stopped supporting Windows Server 2003. They will not provide any security update, hot fix or any support for this product anymore. What does this mean for your business?
We are aware that most businesses still are running Windows Server 2003 and have not migrated to new OS yet. This will be the time when IT as a service will be reviewed and decisions made which path to choose for migrating internal services.
What might you do?
Well the first thing you need to consider is a plan how should you upgrade and where your internal services shall be migrated. If you still do not have it – start drafting it now. By preparing a plan you will gain more knowledge about your existing IT services, internal infrastructure and resource you have. In same time your plan will help to allocate budget, resources needed for IT transition.
What are solutions available from Microsoft?
At the moment they are suggesting to upgrade their new OS called Windows Server 2012 R2. This operating system is built with virtualization and private cloud in mind. So it is quickly gain respect for stabile and easy use of private cloud platform. Usual Windows services (now called Features) are provide with new ones like Storage spaces, Hyper-V and etc.
If you have decided not to upgrade existing hardware or looking to move more internal IT services to Cloud, Microsoft also have some suggestions.
Office 365
Most businesses use MS Office products already and they want to run it on every device. Office 365 provides all this for you. All you need it is just device and company account on Office 365 to support this.
Microsoft Azure
For those who have business critical applications and would like to run them as available all the time, but do not want to invest on new hardware, they can try Microsoft Azure infrastructure.
Open source solutions?
For small or medium businesses the costs sometimes are the main reasons to stick with older technologies for a long time. But nowadays this is not an excuse not to leverage Open source technologies which are highly valued by big corporations. It may look scary and not „Click and get” like once you start using the open source solutions they definitely will deliver the value for lower costs.
When you start deploying new or will be upgrading existing servers you can chose open source operating system like CentOS Linux. This OS is ready for virtualization, clustering and supports modern file systems for all your storage needs.
You can deploy OpenStack for private cloud computing. It will run on all Linux operating systems and can be used to build scalable and flexible private infrastructure.
As for application delivery to end users – Dockers could be your answer. This is a new type of virtualization when you can „ship” all your applications in container and run on any Docker running server. This portability and consistency provides easy way to develop, test and deploy applications.
