Featured Article from Software Licensing

Despite its successes as a cloud provider and with devices like the Surface tablet, Microsoft (News - Alert) still has its troubles. Figuring out how to make Windows work on mobile is one, but the most prominent problem the company currently faces is recovering from low adoption rates for Windows 8. Famously, with its upgrade for free model, Windows 10 is meant to be the answer to this, but it isn’t as simple a solution as it seems.

As Flexera Software recently pointed out on its blog, in a post titled Windows 10 is Not Free, while Microsoft’s no-cost upgrade plan has proven successful so far and will likely continue to be, the model comes with risks for the enterprise. In particular, the Windows as a service model means, in Microsoft’s own words, that Windows 10 is the last version of Windows. This means more frequent updates, in turn requiring businesses to change their approach to dealing with an accelerated update cycle.

Indeed, Microsoft has already released the first major Windows 10 update mere months after the operating system’s initial launch. By contrast, Windows 7 Service Pack 1 wasn’t released until about a year after Windows 7’s launch. With the frequency of updates ramped up this much, it will become necessary for businesses to automate the process for testing and distributing updates as much as possible to save precious IT resources.

Meanwhile, Michael A. Silver, VP at Gartner (News - Alert) Research, says that migration to Windows 10 from Windows 7 or 8/8.1 should be much smoother than, say, from Windows XP to Windows 7. While this is definitely true for home users, it’s hard to believe that enterprises with business critical and legacy applications would agree—especially if they’re still running Windows XP. Again, the upgrade process will require a well thought out plan of action for testing and recuperation.

It’s almost impossible to accurately predict which applications will have issues, even in a home environment. Of course, it’s a safe bet that web applications running on older versions of Internet Explorer will require additional focus and work. After all, older versions of Internet Explorer will be officially end of life come January.

So, the move to Windows 10 will definitely cost some time and resources, at the very least, for most enterprises. The best estimate currently is that it will take organizations 9 months to a full year to get ready for Windows 10. Gartner recommends easing the process by breaking it up into three chunks: gather information, engineering testing and pilot testing. But the main focus should be revising the organizational process and methodology to make future updates as smooth as possible.

And if this all sounds like too much hassle to bother with, you’re in the minority. Gartner expects that 80 percent of enterprise users will be using Windows 10 as soon as the end of 2018.