BITS, a consortium of financial-services companies, and Microsoft last week issued a joint statement saying they agreed to "parameters" for custom support contracts available to BITS members and other companies. Ann Patterson, director of BITS, says more member companies than expected have signed those contracts.
"That's an indication that there are a lot of enterprise customers relying on NT 4.0," Patterson says. She declined to reveal just how widely Windows NT 4.0 is used among BITS's member companies or to discuss details of the contractual terms that were negotiated.
There's hope that obsolescence will make the operating system a smaller target for hackers and virus writers, what Gillen calls "security by obscurity." But with support about to expire on millions of NT 4.0 computers, those systems are neither secure nor obscure.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
