After 12 long years, Microsoft is discontinuing support for Windows Server 2003, and this has a lot of people worried. Windows Server 2003 is still a widely deployed operating system in many places (estimates of deployment vary between 10 to 20 million), and after July 14th, support for security updates will no longer be supplied to address new security vulnerabilities as they are discovered. This has a number of customers concerned as they still have a number of Windows Server 2003 machines deployed and are not able to fully move everything over to an updated operating system before support ends on July 14th, 2015.

While in a perfect world we would all be able to migrate to a new operating system as soon as possible, there are a number of situations where this may not be possible. Be it an old hardware that won’t support a more recent operating system, an application that can’t be made to run properly on an updated version of Windows, or just the sheer number of machines – there are reasons where Server 2003 may still be sticking around past its end of support. Customers are understandably concerned about this and have been asking us if we can help.

The good news is that we are planning to continue supporting Windows Server 2003 for Deep Freeze or our other products, so if you are using any of our products on Windows Server 2003 we are going to continue to support you for as long as we can.

However, just running Deep Freeze may not be enough to be able to protect a machine against new threats as they emerge. As Deep Freeze is non restrictive, there is a chance that something could infect a protected machine and hang out until the machine was rebooted – depending on the threat this could be a small problem, or a huge one – there’s really no way to know. Adding in additional products like Anti-Executable to prevent new malware from running, and having an Anti-Virus package that supports Server 2003 and is kept up to date will help, but at the end of the day the question is not if you will update from Windows Server 2003, it’s when.

If you are not quite finished, give us a shout and we can help buy you the time to finish off your migration plans, and when you are upgraded you can still enjoy the security of the latest version of Windows Server, and that added safety of our software.