Government Will Not Renew Extended XP Support

The government has decided that it won’t sign up for another year of extended support for Windows XP.

As you may be aware, there are still government departments running Microsoft’s venerable operating system – despite the fact that it hasn’t been officially supported by the software giant since last April – which meant that the UK government signed up for Redmond’s Custom Support Agreement last spring, but that agreement won’t be renewed.

The Register spotted a post on the Gov.uk tech blog, which explained that the extended year of support was put in place to “give everyone a chance to get off XP”, although you would think they’d have managed to do that by now given that all departments had seven years previous warning of the April 2014 end of support deadline.

The post noted: “The Technology Leaders met last month and took a collective decision to not extend the support arrangement for 2015. The current support agreement ended in April 2015.

“There has been good progress in moving away from Windows XP across departments and government organisations and with many public bodies this transition is complete.”

That means of course that not all departments have made the move yet, but those computers still running XP will be able to mitigate risks “using the CESG guidance”. However, the post further notes that where the latter isn’t possible, a department may need to review its own “short term transition support”.