It’s never too soon to prepare for the death of an operating system(Opens in a new window). Or is it?

While it might be a bit premature to start backing up your files and mentally steadying yourself for the impending end-of-life support date for Windows 7, a Gartner vice president thinks now is the perfect time for corporations to start coming up with practices and procedures to deal with Microsoft’s eventual abandonment of the OS.

“Microsoft recently ended support for Windows XP and even though the end date was set in 2007 based on a life cycle support policy Microsoft introduced in 2004, many organizations were not able to completely eliminate the OS by the deadline. Nearly a quarter of PCs in organizations were still running Windows XP after support ended, leaving IT to figure out how to secure Windows XP and/or find funding to do so,” Stephen Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said(Opens in a new window) this week.

“The end of support for Windows 7 will be January 2020, assuming there are no changes to its current support life cycle,” Kleynhans said. “While this feels like it’s a long way off, organizations must start planning now, so they can prevent a recurrence of what happened with Windows XP. “

To Kleynahns, there are only three possible options that corporations have at this point. And, yes, they all mostly center on organizations’ ability to stomach Windows 8. Or, to put it more mildly, how they might best integrate a new operating system with their existing software and practices.

In the first scenario, he suggests that companies start using Windows 8 on all of the new systems they purchase—thus reducing the number of Windows 7 machines they have to deal with in the future. That’s assuming that they will have a decent rate of hardware churn over the next six years or so.

In the second scenario, he suggests corporations dig their heels into the ground. Ignore Windows 8, but adopt practices that will allow for the smooth, eventual transition over to a future Microsoft operating system that better aligns with the company’s infrastructure.

“We believe most organizations will do this. With this strategy, many will not eliminate Windows 7 before support ends unless they budget extra funding to do so,” Kleynhans writes.

Finally, corporations could simply switch over to Windows 8 en masse, ditching Windows 7 immediately to take advantage of the later end-of-life deadline for Windows 8 (January 10, 2023). However, Klenynhans doesn’t recommend this approach, as he believes there is “little value in doing this” and a corporation would want to have a “solid business case” for performing such a switch.

While it might seem a little hysterical to be worried about an operating system that will be supported for at least another six years, some people and companies were unprepared for demise of XP despite years of warning. Those PCs still work, by the way, but Microsoft is no longer releasing security updates for them, so they are vulnerable to viruses.

“The biggest problem that organizations have with upgrading to new Windows releases is ensuring application compatibility. The vast majority of Win32 applications that run on Windows 7 will run on future releases, but having applications is only one component of application compatibility,” he writes. “Many organizations, especially those in industries with government oversight or compliance requirements, require applications to be officially supported by the independent software vendor (ISV) and/or go through validation processes to ensure compatibility. Such organizations may find skipping Windows 8 for most devices makes sense.”

For more, check out Why You Should Ditch Windows XP Now and PCMag’s review of Microsoft Windows 8.1 Update.