According to TheRegister.com, the UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) spent £312 million modernizing its IT systems, including replacing 31,500 Windows 7 laptops with Windows 10. The massive investment came as Windows 10 officially reached end of support on October 14, 2024, meaning Microsoft no longer provides security updates unless customers pay extra. Defra’s interim permanent secretary David Hill detailed the spending in a letter to MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, revealing the department still has 24,000 end-of-life devices to replace. The modernization also addressed 49,000 critical vulnerabilities and migrated 137 legacy applications, but the timing suggests significant portions of the investment may already be obsolete.
Sponsored content — provided for informational and promotional purposes.
<h2 id="windows-10-gamble”>The Windows 10 Gamble
Here’s the thing about spending £312 million on an operating system that just lost mainstream support: you’re basically buying yesterday’s technology at tomorrow’s prices. Defra insists this refresh will improve critical systems like flood prevention and border controls while reducing cyber risk. But moving to an unsupported OS does the exact opposite for security. The department won’t say whether they’re paying Microsoft for extended security updates, which tells you everything you need to know. If they’re not paying, they’re running vulnerable systems. If they are paying, that’s millions more on top of the already staggering £312 million.
Deeper Problems Emerge
Now look at what they didn’t fix. The 24,000 remaining end-of-life devices likely can’t even run Windows 10 properly, let alone Windows 11. That suggests this whole Windows 10 migration was essentially a stopgap measure. They’re also running what they call “hyper care” solutions to protect obsolete servers until the next upgrade cycle. Translation: they’re putting bandaids on systems that should have been replaced years ago. This is what happens when you defer IT upgrades for a decade – you end up spending fortunes on temporary fixes that create more technical debt.
A Familiar Government IT Pattern
Government IT projects following this exact pattern have failed spectacularly for decades. They announce massive modernization programs, miss deadlines (Defra submitted their response over a year late), and then deploy technology that’s already outdated. The department claims this will lead to “significant efficiency savings” in the next spending period. But large-scale migrations almost always cost more and take longer than planned. And let’s be honest – when has a government IT project ever come in under budget?
Cloud Migration as the Real Solution?
The one potentially smart move here is Defra’s plan to migrate business-critical applications to the cloud and replace all that aging hardware. If they actually follow through with shutting down those four datacenters and moving to modern cloud infrastructure, this could finally address the root problem. But that’s a massive “if.” Government departments have a terrible track record of completing multi-phase IT transformations. The real test will be whether they treat Windows 10 as a stepping stone or another decade-long destination. Because if they stop here, they’ll just be maintaining another generation of unsupported systems under a different name.
