About 34,115 Indian PSU bank branches are at risk of a security breach once the support for Windows XP ends around April 08, 2014, a study by Microsoft in association with Ascentius Consulting revealed. Though Windows XP will no longer be supported by Microsoft beginning April 08, 2014, but the study shows that the penetration of the same is still high at 40-70% in the banking sector.
Amongst the greatest risks facing banks that maintain their Windows XP installations, despite the end of support, are their ability to respond to customers and manage waiting times. More specifically, a large number of branches that rely on XP, especially in the rural and semi-urban areas may go down and therefore deny service to customers completely. Secondly, in metro and urban branches, the impact may be as great as 55% of customers facing an extended waiting time of up to 30 minutes for an average transaction.
Further, the fiscal impact of this could be as much as loss of business opportunity worth Rs. 1,100 crore in a day and a loss of income of Rs. 330 crore over a period of 3 days (assuming that a major incident may take 3 days for the systems to come up to normal functioning). Non-migration may also expose customers to greater risk of identity theft and fraud.
According to Ascentius Consulting, staying on Windows XP could also mean that banks may face loss of business opportunities because they will not be able to leverage eKYC (electronic Know Your Customer) norms, as proposed by the RBI. Since Windows XP may not support new biometric devices, as required by RBI-UID norms, banks will be constrained to continue with manual verification of customers leading to higher costs and longer customer waiting times.
The 100-working days timeline is crucial for banks as per Ascentius Consulting. This is because their study estimates the time to move from XP to modern technology for banks will be between 4-6 months.
“We have been advising our customers to move off Windows XP for a long time now. There are a significant number of PCs out there that still need to be moved per a plan. The move to a modern OS like Windows 8.1 will not only alleviate the risks for users and businesses but will also open up opportunities posed by modern technology, like the cloud, for them”, said Amrish Goyal, General Manager, Windows Business Group, Microsoft.
“A large part of our PC base was on Windows XP and, as the product is reaching end-of-support, we are in the middle of a phased migration to more recent versions of Windows, including Windows 7 and Windows 8. We’ve already seen that employees have been able to enjoy a lot more features like 64 bit computing with better functionality and benefits. This upgrade also brings value to our internal customers and employees by helping them transition seamlessly and enhance their present work processes,” said Jayantha Prabhu, Chief Technology Officer, Essar Group.
“By migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 we have overcome the challenge of compatibility with modern hardware, software and applications. Security features like bit locker and encryption provide us with better peace of mind while working with sensitive data. The biggest benefit has been that cloud-enabled Microsoft Office 365 is compatible with Windows 7,” said Milind N Kotibhaskar, General Manager, and Division Head, Infotech Division, Toyo Engineering India.