In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service (NHS) has become the latest major organization to miss the end-of-support for Windows 7. At least half a million machines across the public health provider are still running the new outdated platform.
Importantly, this means the NHS missed a government mandated target to update all machines to Windows 10 by time Windows 7 became obsolete.
Microsoft ended support for the platform in January. Organizations will no longer receive automatic bug fixes for security flaws. However, they can still get those updates if they pay a fee. That’s the situation the NHS now finds itself in.
What’s amazing about this situation is the NHS was set up to upgrade to Windows 10. In April 2018, the UK Department of Health and Social Care signed a deal with Microsoft that would let the NHS upgrade to Windows 10 for free.
The deal specifically stated the upgrade had to be complete by 14 January, 2020 because “The Windows 7 operating system will be unsupported after that date.” Clearly the NHS missed the deadline.
Government information shows the NHS runs 1.37 million Windows devices in total. 463,784 of those are still on Windows 7. 587, 531 are on Windows 10, and some thousands are on Windows 8. Microsoft has offered extended support for the machines running Windows 7.
NHS Digital said in a statement: “There is support from Microsoft for devices using Windows 7, in all NHS organisations, until 14 January 2021. Migration to Windows 10 is a process which will differ depending on the specific needs of the organisation.
“We are working closely with the NHS to offer support to migrate to Windows 10 and are on target to complete this before the extended support period ends,” it said.
German Government Miss The Cut-Off
Last month, we reported on the German government having to pay over $800,000 to continue support for Windows 7 after it missed the date.
German news outlet Handelsblatt reports the Ministry missed the deadline for upgrade. Now, it must pay Microsoft a fee for each of its 33,000 Windows 7 machines. It is worth noting the fee is not to upgrade to Windows 10 but to instead extend security support on Win7 for another year.
