In January 2015, Microsoft released a patch to fix an issue in the Network Location Awareness (NLA) service. The vulnerability affects all versions on Windows Server, but a fix was not provided for the Windows Server 2003 platform. As stated in the bulletin, “The architecture to properly support the fix provided in the update does not exist on Windows Server 2003 systems, making it infeasible to build the fix for Windows Server 20031.”
This highlights the differences in operating system (OS) architectures between modern OSes and an OS now over 11 years old. While this alone should not push enterprises to move away from the OS, the impending end of support for this OS should have businesses thinking about what comes next for their remaining Windows Server 2003 deployments.