Defra’s overall investment totaled £312 million during the current spending review cycle and was intended to remove outdated platforms, retiring Windows 7 hardware and supporting essential national services, including flood systems and border operations.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.
Yeah it’s fully captured except for the student device market which is dominated by iPad and Chromebooks. If they lost desktop the only thing left would be servers but desktop to severe isn’t a real big jump. I imagine we would still need some windows servers, things like for our video surveillance system.
The largest hurdle will be making the smart boards work. Sadly they had a version of notebook that was built for Linux but that’s discontinued now.
I’m pretty sure Azure (cloud services) is already Microsoft’s most profitable business unit. Windows and Office just provides some extra walking around money at this point.