Microsoft Software End of Support

Within the next 18 months, four of Microsoft’s key business software programmes are reaching the end of their extended support. There isn’t much time left to get your plans and preparations in place. The affects and risks of running unsupported software is well-known and can leave your organisation open to cyber-attack, data theft and increased costs.

The Trustmarque EOS Report

Our FREE End of Support report details the key end of life dates and available software upgrade options, including information on licensing agreements and subscriptions. The guide covers:

Windows 7
Office 2010
SQL 2008
Windows Server 2008

Download now

What to do about SQL End of Support Webinar

Extended support for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 ends on 9 July 2019. As a part of our customer support, we recently hosted a webinar that confirmed the options available to ensure that SQL 2008 users stay supported and compliant beyond 9 July 2019.

This webinar explains the available options for migrating from unsupported versions of SQL and will help you make an informed decision about which one is most suitable for your organisation’s situation.

Watch our on-demand webinar and plan your next move:

Microsoft End of Life Software

This year and next see the end of life for several important Microsoft software lifecycles. They have had five years of feature development and security updates and five years of extended security updates and patches. For several product sets, the end of support time, or end of life deadline, has now come and organisations should be exploring their software options and preparing to upgrade or find replacements.

	EOS product	EOS date	Replacement	Pick your service
User	Office 2010	13 October 2020	Office 2019 or Office 365	FastTrack Ready Service
Operating System	Windows 7	14 January 2020	Windows 10	Windows 10 Updgrade Readiness Assessment
Database	SQL 2008	9 July 2019	SQL Server 2017 or SQL on Azure	SQL Migration Assessment
Server	Windows Server 2008	14 January 2020	Windows Server 2016 or Windows Server on Azure	Windows Server Migration Assessment

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End of Life – Software upgrades

Over the past five years, cloud computing technology has become more accessible and affordable giving rise to various options when it comes to upgrading. Many organisations are moving to subscription based technologies, as they offer greater flexibility, run on an on-going cost basis combined with continued security and regular feature updates. These technologies are known as “evergreen” as there are no End Of Service (EOS) dates.

The option to purchase the latest ‘out of a box’ software versions through a traditional CAPEX, one-off payment, still exists. However, more modern subscription based models are becoming increasingly popular, not only due to product functionality, but also as Microsoft offers incentives through discounted packages and deployment funding.

Purchasing licenses to downgrade is not an option for EOS software as new patches and security updates will not be developed.

What if you do nothing?

When your software goes out of support, it won’t stop working, but the main and immediate risk is that there will be no more security updates or patches, leaving your organisation vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

For all Microsoft products, once the extended support lifecycle reaches 10 years, there will no longer be any:

Technical support for any on-going issues
Bug fixes for any new issues
Security fixes for undiscovered vulnerabilities

Additionally, users can begin to experience functionality problems due to incompatibility with newer software or systems, and the number of tickets raised will increase the workload of the wider IT team.

Free Customer Workshops

Public Cloud Exploration workshop

Windows 10 Discovery workshop

FastTrack Ready consultation

Microsoft End of Life Timeline

Download our Microsoft End of Life timeline and discover the dates for Windows 7 end of support, SQL 2008 EOL and more key dates for Microsoft Office software:

Download the timeline

About Trustmarque

Trustmarque and Microsoft have a 30-year relationship which has seen us grow into one of their most trusted partners and today we hold multiple gold and silver accreditations. We continually strive to successfully deliver the right IT products and solutions to meet our NHS, Public Sector and corporate customers’ needs.

Our in-house teams of qualified Microsoft experts have specialisms across the many different areas of the Microsoft world: from access to new software and the latest licensing updates; expert delivery architects and engineers to specialist technical support and services programmes.

Trustmarque’s cloud team has a wide and complementary range of skills and experience. Drawn from both the public and private sectors, our team has varied backgrounds including development and infrastructure, solution architects and BI and Analytics specialists. We draw on their expertise, skills and capability to transform organisations into the cloud and deliver better outcomes.