The IT team at Kelsey-Seybold Clinic has a straightforward mandate: Don’t get in the way of the brief time physicians have with patients. So when the time came to migrate the Houston-based healthcare system’s computers from Microsoft Windows 7 to Windows 10, the IT staff made it as seamless for users as flipping a switch.
“But that didn’t occur without planning,” says Martin Littmann, CTO and CISO at Kelsey-Seybold.
The organization has spent two years preparing for Jan. 14, 2020 — the day Microsoft will end support and security updates for Windows 7. It has required infrastructure upgrades, training and painstaking work to ensure that applications will be compatible with the new operating system when the migration occurs. But failure to make the transition can leave organizations vulnerable to security threats, application performance issues and costly fixes.