Berlin - Microsoft has announced that it is ending support for the Windows XP operating system on April 8, 2014.
Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) advises XP users to update to a newer version of Windows or an alternative like Linux by that date at the latest.
After that, there won't be any more security updates, so an attacker could easily exploit vulnerabilities in the operating system.
The system came on the market in 2001.
Surveys have put the number of businesses worldwide still using XP at between 28 percent and 38.7 percent.
Updating to Windows 8 on all of a company's computers is likely to be costly in terms of time and money.
Richard Edwards, an analyst at UK research firm Ovum, advises firms to consider instead “more innovative projects” such as tablets, Google's Chrome OS or virtualization. - Sapa-dpa