UK Government Spending £6,000 Per Computer Every Year To Maintain Desktops 193
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."
Re:How is this even possible? (Score:4, Interesting)
In a business,
You need to test the patch before you allow it to propogate everywhere.
At a minimum, for every tuesday patch, you have 1 person patching a representative sample of your computers and then after seeing the computers still work postpatch, setting up the patch to propagate.
Assuming a 40,000 pound salary for one expert employee... and then another 50,000 pound salary for a back up... costs add up quickly.
Not quite.. but I've been there.. (Score:4, Interesting)
When I worked as a SysAdmin (on to an IT Manager) at a Healthcare system, I inherited a PC system spanning 16 counties, 300 machines all running various iterations of Windows on a mixture of new and incredibly aging machines. We spent so much time and wasted so much money on supporting some of these machines in the remote sites that I eventually got fed up and made a PXE booted custom mini-Linux distro (I dubbed it Spork Linux because it was so damned handy) that included basic web browsing, rdesktop (rdp client), citrix client, helpdesk access and a few misc tools and just setup a central Windows terminal server. This gave us better control over what people were accessing and where, removed licenses for apps that some people really didn't need.. (c'mon.. how many people really needed Microsoft Office suite? So.. we set OpenOffice and made them think some of them had MS Office.. LOL) and helped us "recycle/reuse" some old machines that now acted simply as dumb terminals but booted up in about 5-20 seconds since all that extra bloat wasn't there anymore. After all that license reclaiming and monitoring how much we spent on travel, repairs, etc.. we saved over 75,000$/year easily. It's definitely not that impressive but when you considering that's for a small org covering the geographic distance of a US state.. that's decent enough.. those numbers from the UK government don't surprise me all that much in comparison considering how many machines/people/locations they'd have to support. It's wasteful and awful, but unless someone changes it.. and for the better, they are going to hemorrhage money.