study conducted by Bitdefender of more than 5,000 SMBs in areas like retail, education and healthcare in countries like the US, UK, Germany and Spain revealed some interesting statistics. Namely, around 18% of these small and medium businesses are running Windows XP. Additionally, 37% of the employees in these organizations work remotely, which further surges the risks of staying on the retired operating system without support and security patches. In the words of Catalin Cosoi, chief security strategist at Bitdefender:
“A few weeks after the end of support announcement, a new Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability turned into a permanent threat for XP users. That was until Microsoft issued a patch that was made available for Windows XP users as well. However, this was an exception that shouldn’t make enterprises believe it will happen again, so the swift migration from XP is a must for all users.”Windows 7 Professional, obviously, is the most popular platform with a 53.4% share, while only a small minority had deployed Windows 8.1, Microsoft’s modern version of Windows. Bitdefender themselves are among the numerous antivirus providers that continue to support Windows XP with their security products beyond retirement. The company is set to end support for their products on the retired platform in January 2016. Business users, on the other hand, will be supported until January 2017.]]>
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NIce data and information, Elaine. I think this was/is to be expected. XP is what most businesses have been comfortable with for years. It’s not a surprise that smaller ones are slow to adapt. Time will fix it soon enough.
Couldn’t have summed it up better than you just summed it up. In a couple of years, this won’t be an issue, but it’s going to take a good amount of time.
Unless you running on donated systems, I just don’t buy the idea that idea that the majority of small businesses in incapable of upgrading. Most of them have systems that can run 8