There are Windows end-of-life dates you should be monitoring. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 reached end of life in January 2020. Once a system has reached end-of-life you will no longer receive support from Microsoft, and there will be compliance questions as auditors will have issues with unsupported production systems having potential security vulnerabilities. You should develop a written plan to upgrade existing systems to a supported version, test the plan to verify you won’t have any issues, and implement the plan before your existing systems reach end-of-life.
When deploying a new system to production, you deployment plan should include a plan to either upgrade or retire the system before they reach their projected vendor end-of-life date.
This chart from Microsoft will help you understand the end-of-life dates for the various versions of Windows.
Summary =================================== Operating System End-of-Life =================================== Windows XP - 04/08/2014 Windows Vista - 04/11/2017 Windows 7 - 01/14/2020 Windows 8/8.1 - 01/10/2023 Windows 10 - 10/14/2025 Windows Server 2003 - 07/14/2015 Windows Server 2003 R2 - 07/14/2015 Windows Server 2008 - 01/14/2020 Windows Server 2008 R2 - 01/14/2020 Windows Server 2012 - 10/10/2023 Windows Server 2012 R2 - 10/10/2023 Windows Server 2016 - 01/12/2027 Windows Server 2019 - 01/09/2029
Failure to plan is planning to fail.
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