Exclusive: Most local councils will be running XP after D-day
Freedom of Information request suggests 52 per cent of councils will be running at least some XP machines beyond 8 April end-of-support deadline
More than half of local councils will be running Windows XP in some form after the 8 April end-of-support deadline - including six authorities which will run exclusively on XP - Freedom of Information (FOI) requests filed by CRN suggest.
CRN sent 433 FOI requests to all UK local councils and of the 236 that responded and answered the request, 122 (52 per cent) admitted they expected to be running at least some XP machines after Microsoft ends support.
After 8 April, Microsoft will stop providing XP users with support such as security patches and updates, which the vendor claims will leave users wide open to security breaches.
Over the past year it has been running a migration campaign encouraging businesses and consumers alike to move onto Windows 7 or Windows 8.
The FOI responses CRN received reveals that at least six councils will be running every single one of their devices (desktops, tablets, laptops, thin clients and smartphones) on XP after 8 April. Some 17 councils who responded admitted they will continue to run more than 90 per cent of their device estate on XP, some until as late as next summer.
In total, 121,417 devices - 20 per cent of the total - will be running on XP in the local councils that responded after the support cut-off date.
CRN also sent FOI requests to central government bodies but of the 20 asked, only three responded and answered the questions in the request.
None of those three - the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Scotland Office and the Department for Health - will be running any XP machines after 8 April. Nine central governments would not answer the request for security reasons or because the data was not held. The remaining eight did not respond within the 20-day period.
Microsoft declined to comment on CRN's research, but throughout its migration campaign it has strongly encouraged users to ditch the OS, even going so far as to enforce pop-up boxes on all XP screens as the one-month countdown began.
Microsoft's global channel chief Phil Sorgen (pictured) said in a recent interview that he did not expect everyone to have moved off the 13-year-old operating system by the April deadline.
"We don't think the job will be done on 8 April," he said. "We'll continue to work with customers through our partner ecosystem after 8 April."
Gartner's public sector research director Neville Cannon said the councils choosing to run XP after the cut-off date are playing with fire.
"The difficulty with any security risk now, especially when dealing with citizen data, is that it has to be taken very seriously," he told CRN. "The likelihood of exploitation is going to get factored as being a very real and present danger [to the councils]."
Methodology
On 21 February, CRN sent 455 FOI requests to all local authorities and central government departments. Public bodies are required to respond to requests within 20 working days, meaning the deadline for responses was 21 March. As of that date, CRN had received 291 responses in total - 64 per cent of those asked. Of the total number of responses gathered, 53 chose not to divulge information on the numbers of devices running XP after 8 April due to either security reasons or the fact active migrations meant exact figures could not be given.
Note: Due to the number of migration processes under way within councils at the moment, some could not give exact figures on the OS each device in their estate runs. Therefore, the figures in CRN's research does include some average figures provided by authorities. When councils gave CRN an approximate figure (for example: between 100 and 200 devices), CRN took an average and counted that figure.