End of support is not really a patching problem, it is an inventory problem. Written ahead of the January 2020 cut-off, the argument holds for every deadline since: you cannot remediate the machines your asset register has never seen.
If you do not have any Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 or Office 2010 on your network, you can safely ignore the rest of this article. If you are really sure that you do not, that is.
The problem is that most organisations’ inventories of their IT assets have significant gaps — black holes might be the better analogy — where older machines, remote locations or whole subnets simply never appear on the asset register.
So your inventory might look healthy. Every machine you have inventoried is running a current operating system and a current version of Office. The reality could be that you are about to see — or rather, not see — a significant increase in the security threats facing your organisation.
The real issue is that it takes one outdated system to open you up to catastrophic damage. Take WannaCry. The global ransomware attack of May 2017 spread through outdated Microsoft Windows systems, and in that case Microsoft had already released a patch before the attack. From 14 January 2020 there will be no more patches for Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 at all. Office 2010 follows on 13 October 2020.
Every end-of-support programme fails in the same place. Not at the upgrade — at the census. You cannot plan a migration around an asset register that does not know about the machine in the server room nobody has opened since the last refresh, the PC driving the welcome screen in reception, the box in a remote office, or the desktop being used as a printer stand.
That is an inventory problem, and it is solvable with technology rather than a search party:
Once you can see everything, the sequence is unremarkable:
Steps three and four are where an asset platform earns its place. Software distribution handles MSI, EXE and Click-to-Run packages; WSUS-integrated patch management covers the machines that are staying; Windows 11 upgrade orchestration covers the ones that are moving. Governance Policies let you express the control itself as a rule — BitLocker enabled, Defender running, no unsupported operating system in this location — and then show, continuously, which machines still violate it. That is the difference between a migration plan and a status report.
This post was written a month before the January 2020 cut-off. That date has long since passed, and so has the one after it: Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 on 14 October 2025. There will be another.
The lesson generalises, which is why the post is still here. End of support is not a patching problem that arrives every few years. It is a permanent inventory discipline, and the organisations that handle it calmly are the ones who already know what they own before the announcement lands. The ones who scramble are the ones running a census under deadline.
If your asset register has black holes in it, the time to find them is not the month before support ends. Talk to us about what full coverage would actually take.
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