Planning for life after Server 2008
Microsoft announce End of Life for Server 2008 and Server 2008 r2
January 14, 2020...
...a date that still seems far enough in the future as to not influence day to day operations. However it's a date that all businesses should be planning for. It is the date that Microsoft will cease providing Security updates to Server 2008 and Server 2008 r2 operating systems.
So you may ask, why is this so important?
From this date forward NO further security patches will be supplied by Microsoft for these platforms rendering them a major security risk to any discovered vulnerabilities post this date.
As I write this post it's only 10 months off! For those of you still running workloads on Server 2008 (versions), the planning for a migration off this infrastructure is hopefully well underway! For those that are yet to commence planning, can we suggest the earliest possible start (once of course you are done reading this post)! Given the enforced upgrade requirements it also provides the opportunity for businesses to consider how they could potentially transform the impacted workloads to become more modern, agile or cost effective.
What should I be considering for my business?
With the End of Life of Server 2008, it provides an opportunity for businesses to evaluate their workload and potentially look at alternatives to how these are delivered within the organisation. For those of you who still have on-premises servers, it's a great opportunity to look at a migration path with a Microsoft Cloud Provider! Your workloads could be more suited to being delivered from a Private or Public cloud. A simple approach to addressing your migration includes three steps, Assess, Migrate and Stabilise/ Optimise.
Assess
During this phase, business should take a systematic look at their environment to determine what (you have), where (it is), what (it does), and whether it’s a good candidate for moving to the cloud or upgrading on-premises software and hardware. The output of the Assess phase is typically a list of the items you’ve discovered, prioritised and ranked according to business impact and overall value. (Business-critical resources should be at the top and lower-value and legacy workloads towards the bottom of any list). Tiering your findings enables you to prioritise the systems to migrate or upgrade.
Plan
Once the workloads and machines have been identified, determine a migration path, budget for the migration (including any tools, licensing and hardware upgrade costs), identify training reqirements and business impacts of the migration and complete scheduling and communication plans;
Migrate - The doing phase! The use of tools (both cloud native solutions and those found in more modern Operating Systems) ensure any migration becomes an easier process for businesses. For cloud migration(s), there are a number of tools (such as Azure Site Recovery) that seamlessly rehost virtual machines and Azure Database Migration Service to move databases to Azure. Depending on your approach, you might also refactor apps with container services, rebuild, or rearchitect. For your data (into a public cloud), you can migrate to an Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, or modernize with Azure CosmosDB. For a Private Cloud migration, options include SQL Always On cluster(s). If you plan to upgrade on-premises, explore the latest version of Windows Server, with capabilities that can help you get cloud-and DevOps ready.
Stabilise and Optimise
Once your migrations are complete businesses should take a moment to understand the new features of their Cloud environment or the new Operating System. It's chance to start planning for other digital transformation activities!
Need assistance or don't know where to start?
Having migrated 1000s of customers to new platforms over the past 13 years, Secure-ISS are able to assist with your Server 2008 end of life project. Feel free to reach out to any of our team to start the discussion today.
