It's like ya'll have never heard of automatic cloud backup.
Posts by cptskippy
3 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2011
$17 smartwatch sends something to random Chinese IP address
How Microsoft can keep Win XP alive – and WHY: A real-world example
Wednesday 2nd April 2014 15:47 GMT
Your cost analysis is way off.
For starters you assume that any old developer can come up to speed on an entire operating system in short order. The fact of the matter is that the developers who can are relatively elite and would rather not be maintenance coders. Assuming you had a handful of developers who knew their way around the XP Code base to keep it patch, that's only part of the problem.
The biggest hurdles with supporting XP are with integration testing, compatibility testing, regression testing, and a whole slew of other issues around certifying patches. Microsoft maintains vast arrays of machines of varying configurations in order to certify that changes to the OS do not negatively impact drivers and hardware compatibility. In addition to maintaining compatibility with hardware, they must ensure that they don't break software running on their operating system which is potentially a larger issue than hardware compatibility. Best case scenario they have 100 engineers to maintain the infrastructure necessary to pull this off and that doesn't take into account the cost of the infrastructure itself.
Your real-world example seems to me like a problem you're expecting someone else to solve for you. The reality of the situation is that those XP machines won't run forever and hardware that can run XP is going to be increasingly hard to come by. The logical step is to virtualize those XP machines and run them on a more secure operating system. Virtualized instances would offer enormous benefits to disaster recovery by removing a dependency on legacy hardware and providing a simple recovery solution.
That being said, another flaw with your real-world example is that there really should be an Air Gap between the network your industrial equipment operates on, and the network used for other business functions. Again, this is a problem you should be addressing, and not complaining that someone else hasn't solve it for you. After all, they're your client and they're paying you for solutions.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
