Re: For some small companies it is.........
@Lee D: you're right, it's not about Mom and Pop shops.
But let's go to the other end of the scale. My Global enterprise has 30,000 servers spread from NT4 through to Server 2012, various RHEL releases (some of which are also EOL), and various other things including non-stop, OS/2 and mainframe, across production, PPE, Dev, and integration environments. Almost all do their job quite well, and most are secured behind multiple layers of security so are at minimal risk of attack.
So replacing 5,000 2003 servers just because Microsoft mark it EOL is not just £2k each, but business risk, application development, testing, implementation and decommissioning, none of which benefits a business that's working successfully on what's there today and will naturally be phased out as the applications are replaced.
And let's face it - I'm the CIO Avenade is targeting, not Mom and Pop.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
