As we near the highly anticipated Windows 7 end of life date (01/14/2020 in case you forgot), I wondered which business sectors / organizations will still be running this legacy OS in 2020…and then I came across a report from Forescout that confirmed my worst fears.
It looks like the healthcare industry will have a lot of catching up to do since it is anticipated that the majority of all devices will be running an unsupported OS after January 14, 2020.
According to summaries of the Forescout report that can be found on Askwoody.com,
Within our data sample… 71% of devices will be running unsupported Windows operating systems by January 14, 2020.
The study revealed that 40% of deployments had more than 20 different operating systems on their medical VLANs.
Source data for this report came from the Forescout Device Cloud, a repository of host and network information for more than 8 million devices, making it one of the largest crowdsourced device repositories. For this study, researchers limited Device Cloud analysis to 75 healthcare deployments with over 10,000 virtual local area networks (VLANs) and 1.5 million devices. Since the primary focus of the report is the status of medical devices, many of the results are based on analysis of more than 1,500 medical VLANs with 430,000 devices.
Very scary in the grand scheme of things! Microsoft, if you’re listening, you may want to think about extending support for a bit longer…