Office 2007 still a popular choice for businesses despite security risks

You may be aware that Microsoft’s venerable Office 2007 is no longer supported as of last month, but that hasn’t stopped over two-thirds of businesses using the productivity suite.

According to a new report from Spiceworks, 68% of firms are still using Office 2007 somewhere in their business, even though it is no longer receiving any security updates (or indeed other patches).

As for the most commonly used version of Microsoft’s suite, that’s Office 2010, which 83% of firms are using. And it’s certainly not the latest Office 2016, which is only being used by 17% of businesses.

That said, there’s brighter news for Office 365, as 53% of companies are using the subscription-based offering, and a further 17% are planning to shift to the cloud-based suite within the next two years.

That rather dwarfs the amount of businesses using G Suite, Google’s rival online product, which is only used by 17% of organizations.

Ancient Office

The research, which encompassed IT departments across the US, UK and Canada, came up with a further very worrying nugget: some firms (3%) are even still using Office 97.

Peter Tsai, senior technology analyst at Spiceworks, commented: “Although they’re aware of the security risks of running end of life software, many IT departments haven’t had the budget, time, or resources required to implement new productivity suites and train end users accordingly.

“However, as IT budgets and staff begin to grow in 2018, more organizations will look to invest in newer cloud-based and as-a-service productivity suites with more resources to manage the transition.”

In other words, Office 365 is expected to be the biggest growth area among the various incarnations of Microsoft’s productivity suite, particularly when it comes to enterprises with more than a thousand staff members, Spiceworks observes.

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