The importance of migration - Buy now or pay later

"IT pros can deploy new apps, images, and systems without fear of losing user settings making transitions to Windows 7 and App-V faster and without user disruption."

It's not just Microsoft singing AppSense's praises. Customers who've migrated from XP to Windows 7 with the help of AppSense also extol its virtues.

"By taking a people-centric approach with AppSense, we migrate three times as many desktops per day using the same level of IT resource, more importantly, no disruption to our staff," says Ian Cawson, technical architect at The Co-operative Group.

"Our investment in AppSense will continue to pay dividends when we migrate to future operating systems beyond Windows 7 having already virtualised our users, we will continue to receive the same or improved benefits in terms of speed, reduced cost and complexity and a better user experience."

Rob Arnold, head of customer IT Support at the University of Birmingham, adds: "AppSense enables us to deliver to our staff and student body during the migration phase and beyond AppSense will facilitate a shift to a more user centric model that not only supports our current needs, but also provides the means for IT to enable a strategic transformation of the ICT infrastructure in the future"

AppSense can work with companies of all sizes to move from Windows XP to Windows 7 without disruption to users or workflow. In essence businesses get all of the benefits but none of the pain association with traditional migrations.

"Today, many organisations have yet to migrate to Windows 7 and current estimates place the installed base of Windows XP at approximately 45 per cent market share. For those organisations that haven't migrated, they face significant business ramifications if they don't complete the migration in time," says Carl Cross, senior vice president, sales and general manager of Americas of AppSense.

"The cost of custom support agreements will potentially cost millions of dollars. AppSense is focused on helping organisations understand both migration and post migration desktop optimisation savings that counter staggering custom support costs associated with not migrating to Windows 7."

With Microsoft just this week once again warning of the vulnerabilities soon to be associated with running a legacy OS like Windows XP, can you really afford not to migrate?

"The very first month that Microsoft releases security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse engineer those updates, find the vulnerabilities and test Windows XP to see if it shares those vulnerabilities. If it does, attackers will attempt to develop exploit code that can take advantage of those vulnerabilities on Windows XP. Since a security update will never become available for Windows XP to address these vulnerabilities, Windows XP will essentially have a 'zero day' vulnerability forever," said Microsoft's Tim Rains, in a blog post.

"The data we have on malware infection rates for Windows operating systems indicates that the infection rate for Windows XP is significantly higher than those for modern day operating systems like Windows 7 and Windows 8."

So, when it comes to Windows XP vs Windows 7, the choice is entirely yours: Stay and reminisce about the good old days with just memories and insecurities, or migrate, move forward and never look back.