The company I’m at currently has over 500 Windows 2003 servers remaining globally in production and even though they have a refresh plan they are working through, they are not going to be done anytime soon. Probably not till mid next year considering some of the 3rd party applications and level of effort to migrate those apps to the new servers.

What I would like to know is if there are any solutions that would help reduce the risk of having these boxes on the network for another year or longer. I understand how bad it is, and management also understands but since I can’t snap my fingers and make them go away, are there any steps I can take to minimize the risk? None are running any web services, just different application servers and a few SQL database servers.

Someone in the firm mentioned a product called StormShield. (Never heard of them and when I called the US partner phone number, I got a cheap voice mail system that scared me more than having 2003 on the network)

Would love to hear your suggestions and thanks in advance.

The company I’m at currently has over 500 Windows 2003 servers remaining globally in production and even though they have a refresh plan they are working through, they are not going to be done anytime soon. Probably not till mid next year considering some of the 3rd party applications and level of effort to migrate those apps to the new servers.

What I would like to know is if there are any solutions that would help reduce the risk of having these boxes on the network for another year or longer. I understand how bad it is, and management also understands but since I can’t snap my fingers and make them go away, are there any steps I can take to minimize the risk? None are running any web services, just different application servers and a few SQL database servers.

(Someone in the firm mentioned a product designed specifically for protecting W2K3 servers, but their local partner was inaccessible.)