Microsoft urges companies to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10

A relatively large number of Internet users are still clinging to the ancient Windows XP operating system and one of Microsoft's nightmares is that we may see a repeat of this when the company cuts off support for its Windows 7 operating system.

The latest operating system marketshare data from NetMarketShare reveals Windows 7 is still used by a whopping 48.34 percent of web users. At the moment there's not a big problem yet but users and especially companies need to take into account that Windows 7's extended support ends on January 14, 2020. This means that after that date, there will be no further security updates for Windows 7.

Markus Nitschke, head of Windows at Microsoft Germany, urges companies to think ahead and points out that Windows 7 "does not meet the requirements of modern systems, nor the security requirements of IT departments."

With so many companies holding onto their PCs for so long, that may not be a big reason to drop the older operating system. This is where security comes in. Windows 10 includes a wide range of security improvements that aren't found in Windows 7: stronger built-in biometrics with Windows Hello, cloud-based threat analytics with Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, built-in sandboxing with AppContainer (used for Store apps, the Edge browser, and certain aspects of font-handling), virtualization-based security to protect against certain kinds of credential theft, and much more. The value of these improvements is not that they address individual security flaws, rather they make whole classes of flaw harder to exploit, protecting the operating system against both known and unknown threats. Microsoft argues that it is these systemic, architectural protections that mean corporations should adopt Windows 10 over Windows 7.

Via: ARS Technica