14 DAY TRIAL // The United States Navy is still running Windows XP on many of its internal computers and because support is no longer offered since April 2014, US authorities started talks with Microsoft to get updates and security patches for another year.
And according to a report by PC Advisor, the two sides reached an agreement this month, so the United States Navy will pay Microsoft no less than $9.1 million (8.1 million Euro) for extended support for the whole year for Windows XP, Office 2003, Exchange 2003, and Windows Server 2003 (whose support is coming to an end next month).
The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, which is in charge of managing communications and information networks for the US Navy, says the organization already started the migration off Windows XP in 2003, but because of the apps and services designed to run on old Windows versions, moving all computers to newer releases of the operating system is not possible.
But the US Navy now hopes to have enough time to complete the transition, pointing out that the deal with Microsoft can be extended to 2017 in case the upgrade isn’t performed fully in the first year. If the deal is extended for another year, it could reach $30.8 million (27.5 million Euro).
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In an official document, the US Navy says that purchasing extended Windows XP support was a critical step to keep computers fully up-to-date and secure against threats that are supposed to exploit vulnerabilities found in the operating system and which are left unpatched because of EOS.
“Without this continued support, vulnerabilities to these systems will be discovered, with no patches to protect the systems. The resulting deterioration will make the U.S. Navy more susceptible to intrusion ... and could lead to loss of data integrity, network performance and the inability to meet mission readiness of critical networks,” the document reads.
Windows XP is still being used by some 12 percent of the computers worldwide, according to data provided by third-party researchers, but with the release of Windows 10, these figures are likely to drop rapidly in the next 12 months.