Converting Your Workplace To A New OS
As you likely know, Windows ended their support for Windows 7 earlier this year. What this means, practically, is that machines with Windows 7 will continue to function, but will no longer receive updates from Microsoft, period. This includes quality of life updates- those small tweaks that make using the system easier- through security updates. The latter is what is important to know for you business. If all your machines are running on Windows 7, their security is not going to progress. And that may not be great for you.
A lot of companies are moving to part or full time remote work for at least some if not much of their work force, which means that security has become more important than ever. The way people use computers for work has shifted drastically since January of this year. Windows 7 has gotten out of date at a fairly exponential pace, is the point, and if you're still using Windows 7 for your business you may be opening yourself up to tragic and unpredictable usage and security issues.
Converting all your machines over is, to be quite frank, going to be a pain. And even if you have a dedicated IT team, they're probably currently hectically trying to keep on top of all the new software that is being used. As important as computers have become- even more important than they were before, if that can be believed- you want a team dedicated to transitioning your machines to a new OS.
This is where IT consulting services can really come in extremely useful. Many of them are experienced with this type of transition, having been doing it since Windows announced that they were going to be ending support for Windows 7, and have also been working with companies to set up the remote working options that are right for them. This is experience that your dedicated IT team may not have, if you have an IT team in the first place.
If you do not, it is even more important that you look into outside help. This is a big project and it has a lot of moving parts. You'll need backups of all your data, you'll need backups of your backups, you'll need people who can best help you plan for which machines need to switch and when it needs to be done. Yeah, it'll cost you some money, but to smooth out this transition it really is worth spending it.