Depending on operating systems and software that have reached their end of life is a growing risk for IT.
A product that has reached its end of life is no longer supported by the vendor, and may mean any security risks will not be addressed by updates. Every product you have in your environment that has reached its EOL date adds one more potential foothold for a hacker to gain access to your environment.
One current example is Windows XP, which goes end of life this April. Companies may depend on a specific version of a browser, which requires them to stay on Windows XP for business-critical apps; or a legacy piece of software that does not support Windows 7; or have embedded systems running Windows XP.
In all those cases, after April 8th, 2014 you will no longer receive security updates for your XP machines. Java runtime is another all too common example of a product that has exceeded its end of life and is still commonly found in companies around the world. Java 6 reached its end of life in February of 2013, but for as little as $450 a hacker can buy off the shelf exploit toolkits to take advantage of known vulnerabilities.
In this webinar we will look at steps a company can take to reduce or remove these risks, including:
- Understanding the software you have in your environment and identifying dependencies;
- Identifying risks, and alternatives to at-risk systems;
- Look for alternative solutions that do not have this dependency;
- Premium support options;
- Virtualisation and even hardware upgrades to remove end-of-life systems from the network.