Plan-B Ready as Windows 2003 Server Support Ends: CIOs

Microsoft had long announced that their support for Windows server 2003 will end on July 2015. Now that the time is closing upon the tech industry, the need to have a plan in place so as to prevent panic and chaos in the IT department becomes extremely essential.

“We run our business-critical applications on Microsoft, be it end-point, like laptops and desktops, or servers. We knew this was about to happen, so six months back we started migrating. We have upgraded everything everywhere,” said Sanjeev Kumar, group CIO and president-business excellence, Adhunik Group of Industries.

G.S. Rao, CIO, KSK Energy Ventures, was also in line with the news. “Because we are in an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, we have already planned the migration. Every year we have a plan chalked out for all our companies. We had migrated to Windows 2008 in 2012 itself,” he said.

It seems like Indian CIOs are up to date and aptly foresighted when it comes to server migration. Similar to Kumar and Rao, Dhiren Savla, global CIO, VFS Global Group, also made it a point to save his enterprise from any last minute trouble.

“We started the migration exercise well in advance, and most of our servers have already migrated. The few servers that are pending have extended support enabled, which is valid up to July 2015,” said Savla.

However, the challenge that now arises due to such an announcement is that how does a CIO budget his server migration. Some CIOs have their migration already covered while others have kept a separate budget for the same.

“Since using the latest technology is core to our business, we have been enterprise customers for Microsoft. Under our agreement, we are covered for all upgrades, so any kind of an additional budget is not required,” Savla said.

Rao from KSK Energy Ventures said, “To budget this we have roped in a major chunk from our highest volumes of production. One-third of the production budget has been kept for migration,” said Rao.

Though Indian CIOs seem well-equipped as far as server migrations are concerned, it is important to note that since all software services are perishable, a plan-B always comes in handy to tackle any unexpected situations.

“As we know most of the software products have a limited life cycle, a yearly plan prepared well in advance will help protect one’s investments. This will prevent panic in such cases of sudden announcements,” said Kumar.