14 DAY TRIAL // Windows XP support ended in April 2014, but despite the security risks caused by running outdated software, the 2001 operating system is still powering a large number of computers across the world.
The London Metropolitan Police is one of the organizations still sticking with Windows XP, despite a migration plan that started nearly three years ago.
But this year the transition off Windows XP will certainly be completed, the Met’s officials guarantee, as the target for the last computers to be upgraded to Windows 10 is now May.
As ITPro notes, the migration from Windows XP to Windows 10 happened at a rather slow pace for the London police forces, as despite having started in 2014, the upgrade process left some 35,000 computers running Windows XP in April 2015 and 18,000 in June 2017.
Cloud-based collaboration tools
The London police, however, will not only replace the operating system on the desktop, but modernize the entire IT infrastructure, with tablets and laptops to be deployed for officers, as well as a cloud database that would make managing information a lot easier.
“The tablet and laptop rollout ... will finish around the April-May time [and] we will be off XP then. We might have the odd machine that's still on it, but it won't be on the network, it'll just be running some software that at this time we cannot run on anything else,” the Met's CIO Angus McCallum was quoted as saying. “We won't have any networked machines at that time.”
The Met signed a deal with Box to deploy cloud-based collaboration tools for the staff and following a pilot program, all services are now being released to officers.
“What we really wanted was a collaboration tool so we can share securely information with third-parties that can be structured appropriately. We can make sure it's in the right folders, we can make sure it's not being stored in email, et cetera,” McCallum explained.
While more and more organizations are moving away from Windows XP, the operating system still survives, according to third-party data. December figures provided by NetMarketShare show that Windows XP was running on 5.18% of PCs worldwide last month, despite no longer getting updates since April 2014. Windows XP launched in 2001.
