Last month OnTheWight was able to reveal that over half of the Isle of Wight council’s computers were still running Windows XP, despite Microsoft officially stopping support for it on 8th April 2014.
Microsoft ended mainstream support for XP five years earlier, back in 2009.
Readers may be surprised to hear that the Isle of Wight NHS has an even larger percentage of its computers still running on the Microsoft operating system software that is now potentially vulnerable to threat.
The IW NHS have around 3,200 computers on site at St Mary’s Hospital, including laptops.
The local health authority tells OnTheWight that a whopping 87.5% (2,800) of them are still running Windows XP.
Undertaking review
A spokesperson for IW NHS told OnTheWight,
“The Trust changed its rolling replacement programme to include a move away from Microsoft windows XP in 2013 upon acknowledgement of Microsoft’s position. The Trust has its own robust security and support infrastructure to control risk.
“However the Trust is at the present moment actively reviewing these plans with a view to providing more assurance over the control of risks including the additional insurance/support packages recently made available via the DOH. We are also assessing options with the intention to move further faster in terms of replacing windows XP on Trust computers.”
The IW NHS were unable to provide an anticipated date when no computers would be running Windows XP at the hospital.
Update 16:21: Thanks to Kath who got in touch to let us know about a £5.5m deal the UK Government has signed with Microsoft to support Windows XP for another year.
This wasn’t mentioned by the IW NHS. It’s currently unclear if this deal covers the Island.
Image: r_grandmorin under CC BY 2.0
