Mainstream support for Windows Server 2003 ended on 13 July 2010, and the extended support period ends on 14 July 2015. Despite the fact that the end of support will leave enterprises still running on Windows 2003 vulnerable, many South African enterprises have been slow to migrate. This, says HP, is partly due to an 'if it isn't broken, don't fix it' mindset, and partly because many are only now coming to grips with the huge complexity in their application environment.
Riaan Ferreira, country manager TS Consulting at HP, says migration impacts operating systems and workloads. "When it comes to the workloads, many enterprises are running very specialised applications for their lines of business. Often, they are bespoke, legacy applications whose developers are no longer associated with the company. Migration is not a simple matter, particularly if you are looking at 500 or more enterprise applications. There are the questions of whether the applications will be compatible and supported with the Microsoft version they must be migrated to, and what the impact of migration will be on the inter-dependencies between applications."
"Enterprises are realising that the app migration issue can be a beast," agrees Duarte Guerra, Solution Account CTO at TS Consulting, HP. Not only is it proving complex to unravel and understand the environment, but finding the highly skilled resources to rewrite the code on legacy applications can prove costly. Then there is the question of testing and downtime to ensure these often mission-critical apps have been successfully migrated, he notes.
Duarte says enterprises have little choice but to begin the process. "If the applications are mission-critical, they cannot be allowed to become vulnerable, and local enterprises are becoming concerned about this." Attempting to address the challenge in-house is likely to cost enterprises a significant percentage of this year's IT budget in terms of dedicated resources, he estimates.
Ferreira says, however, local enterprises are not alone. "HP has partnered with Microsoft to support customers in their migration process. We have successfully migrated large numbers of enterprises across operating systems and environments, and the model for migration is structured and straightforward. It begins with strategic workshops to understand the enterprises vision, their objectives and also to assess the current landscape and prioritise applications for migration, looking at their importance to the business, the associated risks of them becoming vulnerable, and the options for migration, before preparing a road map for migration."
With a broad range of solutions and the necessary tools and expertise to rewrite code, discover application inter-dependencies, prepare a migration road map and build an effective testing environment, HP is now helping customers prepare for their application migration journey.
For more information, go to www.hp.com/go/ws2003.
Share
Editorial contacts