Windows Server 2003 End of Life

Microsoft has announced the official date for end-of-life support as July 14, 2015. While many administrators are well aware of this fact, there are still nearly a million servers across the globe currently running live applications on Windows Server 2003.

It should be cause for alarm that so many businesses are still reliant upon an operating system originally released almost 10 years ago (December, 2005 for Windows 2003 R2). More concerning is that many of these W2k3 servers are running applications originally developed for a 32-bit operating system.

Even if your Windows 2003 server is stable at this time, do you want to risk running your applications on a server that will not ever again be supported starting July 15, 2015?

Consider also that most all hosting service providers will ultimately force their customers to migrate to newer, fully supported platforms so that they can continue to provide the support – and security – promised in their service level agreements, which will not be possible once the Windows 2003 server OS is officially unsupported.