Businesses looking to upgrade to Windows 11 could find themselves in a tough spot as a new report has found that more than a third of work PCs don’t meet the minimum requirements to run the latest operating system. from Microsoft.
In his last Business Status Report Looking at enterprise Windows 11 readiness, network performance company Riverbed found that 34% of devices currently in use today are not capable of running Windows 11. Indeed, Microsoft requires 4GB of memory, 64GB storage, UEFI secure boot, DirectX compatible graphics card with WDDM 2.0 driver and Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 to run Windows 11.
While RAM, hard drives, and SSDs can easily be upgraded on most business PCs, the lack of TPM 2.0 is the primary reason enterprise devices will need to be replaced according to Riverbed:
“The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 requirement is the main driver for device replacement. With 10% of devices will need to be replaced due to a lack of TPM 2.0 and a further 11% will need to be upgraded to run TPM 2.0 before upgrading to Windows 11.”
Replace, upgrade or migrate to the cloud
When it comes to hardware upgrades, Riverbed found that 19.45% of devices will need a storage upgrade, 11% will need to be upgraded to TPM 2.0, and 8% will need to be upgraded with UEFI. However, the report also revealed that 12% of work computers will need to be replaced entirely.
Fortunately, things have improved a bit when it comes to business readiness for Windows 11. In September last year, a study by IT asset management firm Lansweeper found that 44.4% of work were not eligible for automatic upgrade from Windows 10.
As it stands, Windows 11 usage is still very low among enterprises according to Riverbed’s report with only 50,000 hours from June last year to January 2022. However, across all versions of Windows , companies used Microsoft’s operating system between 150 and 200 m. hours on average each month.
Businesses that don’t want to replace their existing hardware have another option as they can move all of their workloads to the cloud while using Microsoft’s software and operating system through its Windows 365 Cloud PC service. As the end of life date for Windows 10 is set for October 14, 2025, companies still have time to upgrade.
Via ZDNet
