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UK Government Spending £6,000 Per Computer Every Year To Maintain Desktops

Posted by samzenpus on from the white-elephant-computing dept.

girlmad writes "The UK government's chief operating officer Stephen Kelly offered a frightening insight into the world of government IT spending this week. According to Kelly, the government spends £6,000 per year per PC just to maintain the devices, and wastes 3 days per year per person due to slow boot-up times."

2 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How is this even possible? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, the UK government doesn't pay for support by the hour, they have established support contracts in place with several large UK companies.

    The "hack job" of an article "forgets" that desktop prices include all the network infrastructure and the standard software packs. Switch ports, uplinks etc and the aforementioned support in place

    The hack job article only touches lightly on the software costs of major application providers but fails to mention the amount of support required to maintain the crap that a lot of Government writes for itself... which is a lot of the most god awful crap.

    The hack job of an article also fails to mention the rules and conditions that they, themselves, impose of desktop requirements. A vast amount of UK Government is required to operate at IL2 and IL3 security impact levels. Everything that touches said network, must be accredited to that security level. All software, all network, everything... EAL4/EAL4+ infrastructure is not cheap because of what the worlds Governments demand the manufacturers.

    So, this article is complete crap, written by someone with no obvious understanding of the technical and security requirements and by stating "just buy iPads" she has told the world that she really does know nothing about large infrastructure design, planning and implementation.

  2. Re:Guess you didn't read the artice by jythie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For that matter, it does not even really say if it _means_ desktops. My guess is that the person just took the IT budgets of all the offices and divided it by the number of computers they had and came up with the number, skipping over things like server costs. The number is so silly-high that I am skeptical that it represents what they say it does.