Defra’s overall investment totaled £312 million during the current spending review cycle and was intended to remove outdated platforms, retiring Windows 7 hardware and supporting essential national services, including flood systems and border operations.
According to Defra’s submission to Parliament, the program eliminated more than 31,000 legacy laptops, addresses a large backlog of vulnerabilities, and even closed one data center, with several more set for decommissioning over the coming years.
Defra did not confirm whether it intends to pay Microsoft for extended support, leaving open the possibility that the department’s refreshed estate may soon fall behind again.
Theoretically a lot of this spend also comes with support contracts, and I expect even moving to a Linux flavor would have to, as well. The last public outfit I worked in was using RHEL as their path forward from big iron AIX, and even that only on the very particular piece of infrastructure I was working on, since it was a Windows shop. The licensing and support was definitely a better experience than M$, but I expect you’d be hard pressed to find a government who’d sign off on just deploying Mint on 5000 workstations and calling it a day. There’s also the enormous inertia of Windows sysadmins who only know how to do MDM and group policy and shit in AD with a GUI.
There was a time where this would make me irrationally annoyed. I don’t even know why anymore.
😮💨 You’re 100% correct. RHEL would definitely be the path forward here. Interestingly though I’m reminded of this story from a over a decade ago. Not sure where they are now.