UK.gov splashes out on 40,000 new devices amid COVID-19-fuelled homeworking boom
- Reference: 1590063503
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/21/ukgov_device_spending_boom_coronavirus/
- Source link:
The Ministry of Defence, for example, ordered 13,500 laptops, more than 3,200 tablets and 2,200 phones since the crisis began in March, according to research from the Parliament Street think tank.
Figures obtained under Freedom of Information showed that the MoD had also purchased a whopping 9,476 Office 365 licences. Mr Nadella and the crew in Redmond will be rubbing their hands together with glee.
In total the MoD, Home Office, Cabinet Office, Treasury and Ministry of Justice bought more than 40,000 new laptops, fondleslabs and phones between them.
By contrast the tight-pursed Department for Transport, as well as the Foreign Office, bought nothing new – except for 15 Zoom licences. A more connected MoD took out 550 Zoom licences since the measures to contain the virus began, however.
Ever the elite department, the Cabinet Office obtained 59 MacBook Airs, 91 Elitebooks and 68 iPhone 6s.
Parliament Street linked the purchase of Zoom licences with rather outdated warnings about the security of the videoconferencing app. While it's far from perfect, the latest version did plug the obvious security howlers that had knowledgeable folk [1]tearing their hair out earlier this year .
An ominous Paul Farrington, EMEA CTO of Veracode, commented in a canned statement: "It's critical that key government departments are cautious if using the platform for sensitive meetings, around national security, and public health. With cyber attacks on the rise, it's also crucial that users ensure they have downloaded the latest versions of these applications, to prevent hackers from gaining access and stealing data."
As El Reg [2]revealed in March , private organisations were also rushing to switch budgets to help their workforce flex to home work. Computacenter, one of Europe's largest resellers, told us large corporations ordered thousands of laptops. Monitors, VPN services and wireless LANs were also in big demand, CEO Mike Norris confirmed.
Customer spending on cloud infrastructure services rocketed globally to [3]$31bn in Q1 as businesses across the globe scaled their operations to cope with more homeworking amid national lockdowns. Demand for clouds has pressured [4]Microsoft and [5]Google to ensure they have enough capacity to serve customers.
For some, the switch from office work may not just be a tactical move: India's Tata Consultancy Services has already signalled that for some staff, [6]working remotely will become permanent . ®
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/22/zoom_5/
[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/20/home_working_laptops_monitors_wlans_selling_fast/
[3] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/01/31bn_spent_on_cloudy_infrastrucutre/
[4] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/29/microsoft_azure_usage_surge_coronavirus/
[5] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/19/gcp_gpu_constrained/
[6] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/28/tata_consultancy_services_to_persist_with_remote_work/
Re: ‘68 iPhone 6s”
Because they couldn't afford the wireless earphones needed to conf call on an 7 or higher
the MoD had also purchased a whopping 9,476 Office 365 licences. Mr Nadella and the crew in Redmond will be rubbing their hands together with glee.
A single copy of Microsoft 365 for Business is £45 pa. I sincerely hope that even the bozos in MoD purchasing could get some sort of discount for 10,000 off. But even on such a silly basis, that's under $500k pa (or 1/250,000 of Microsoft revenue). A lot of money to me, but I doubt any Microsoft salesdroids will be bathing in champagne as a result.
There are other benefits
Once you have the MOD spaffing out on Orofice365, they are completely open to any security infringements MS may want to pull on behalf the NSA, CIA, FBI or any other criminal organisation that is either fronted by the US government or has lots of money to play with.
This could be very profitable indeed!
£45/year means NPV is £150 even assuming zero profit for the first year, a 5% discount rate and only five years of payments. So triple your initial revenue estimate.
Now add 20% support fees, chuck in the inevitable additions around single sign-on, cloud storage and other services then start looking at the new opportunities getting your foot in the door just opened up.
Yeah, someone in sales just picked up a new car from this one, they may not be bathing in champagne but I'm betting a bottle or two was drunk.
Buying more MS licenses?
Isn't there some kind of multi-spangly-million framework agreement thingy with Microsoft for Government departments? Much touted as being super-good value?
13,000 laptops
I bet they aren't £400 cheapy basic ones for all the drones. I wonder how many top-range Surfaces got sneaked in!
A phone call to NHS England to see how man they've purchased might be interesting............
‘68 iPhone 6s”
Really? IPhone 6 or 6s, it’s not clear which? The iPhone 6 is ancient, and no longer gets the latest OSes, and is due to go completely out of support in the next two-three years. It’s still getting security updates, including yesterday’s update to 12.4.7. It is effectively unsalable, I got a SE 2020 to replace my 6 and the best offer I got to buy the 6 was $60, so the 6 is now my spare phone. I’ll plug it in to power to get the battery back to 100% and to download the update later today. The 6s is one year less ancient, is barely salable, is still able to get the latest OS, until September/October this year when it will join the 6 on the no-longer-supported pile. Is HM Gov so penny-wise and pound-foolish that they didn’t go for a 8, or at least a 7, instead? Or is it that someone’s second cousin had a pile of unsalable 6s or 6ss and HM Gov is, um, helping them out? Or are they really that cheap and have not the slightest idea about future-proofing?