It can be easy to think that by not upgrading your operating systems and applications that you are saving your organisation money.
In fact the opposite is true:
When an operating system or software package is declared “End of Support” (or “EOS”) by the vendor, it will no longer receive important security updates which help protect your computer against the most common forms of cyber attack.
This is important because security researchers and malicious hackers will continue to find security bugs in current versions of the software, and then proceed to reverse engineer those bugs for prior versions.
For example – a bug found in Microsoft Office 2013 (which is still receiving security updates from Microsoft) will probably also exist in Microsoft Office 2007 because software suites tend to share a common history and underlying programming code.
The Office 2007 user will never receive a fix for that bug because Office 2007 went End Of Support in 2017
Using unsupported software puts your computer and data at risk of a data privacy breach.
A cyber criminal is looking to expose not only your data but your customer’s data too – and continuing to use unsupported or out of date software, when modern alternatives exist, may mean you or your organisation are not adequately safeguarding data.
There could also be significant cost in maintaining and bug fixing EOS software:
- Lost staff productivity
- IT department or IT outsourcer time
- Business interruption
We recommend upgrading Windows 7 and Office 2010 to Microsoft 365 Business. This combines all the functionality of Office 365 with Windows 10, and will ultimately reduce your costs long-term, increase your staff productivity & enhance your IT security.
