Despite the awareness that in six months Microsoft will officially end its support for its nearly 10-year-old operating system, Windows 7, 18% of large enterprises have not yet migrated to Windows 10, according to new research from Kollective.

At the start of 2019, researchers found that 43% of companies were still running Windows 7. Of those, 17% didn’t even know about the end of support. In its most recent analysis of 200 US and UK IT decision makers, the report revealed that organizations have a long way to go to prepare for the much anticipated end of Windows 7 support.

Six months later, 96% of IT departments have started their migration, and 77% have completed the move. However, given that the migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 reportedly took some firms more than three years to complete, companies that have not started migration are at risk of missing the final deadline.

In order to aid organizations in deploying a new OS to all endpoints, Microsoft has provided different options for companies still running Windows 7, one of which includes an extended support package at an annual cost of up to $500,000 for a company with 10,000-plus endpoints, the research said.

“The combined versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems equal more than 50 percent of global operating system usage. Windows 10 has the lion’s share of the market, which bodes well for security since Microsoft’s support for Windows 7 will end in January 2020,” wrote the Center for Internet Security (CIS), which released the CIS Controls Microsoft Windows 10 Cyber Hygiene Guide on July 11.

“Though many businesses are better prepared now than they were for the end of Windows XP, the move to Windows 10 comes with its own set of challenges,” said Dan Vetras, CEO of Kollective. “The migration itself is only the first step. IT managers moving to Windows 10 now have to prepare their networks for increasingly frequent ‘as a service’ updates to the OS. They will need to ensure their networks are ready for more testing, more roll outs and more network congestion to keep up to date.”