DoD Agency Hits a Speed Bump in its Windows 10 Migration Plan

In February of this year, the Department of Defense announced an aggressive plan to migrate its computers to Windows 10 within a year. Now, just 3 months into the endeavor, the implementation may have hit a snag.

According to Federal News Radio, the DoD selected the Marine Corps to do first with the migration, primarily because this group represented the smallest of the Defense services. Initially, the project scoped that 60 to 70 percent of the Marine Corps computers could be upgraded remotely, but that number has been cut significantly to only 10 percent. The reason? Hardware – or rather hardware purchasing policies.

Brig. Gen. Dennis Crall, the Marine Corps CIO, said…

Our challenges are with hardware, and hardware that is older than a couple years is having more difficulty accepting Windows 10 than hardware that is new. And when you look at what ‘new’ means within DoD, we purchase yesterday’s technology tomorrow. A lot of our brand-new systems are having difficulty with the upgrade as soon as they come out of the box, and we didn’t anticipate that.

Go figure. This is not a new conundrum for any government agency. Dealing with outdated and antiquated computing hardware happens all the time across any government agency. My son recently needed to send a document to a government agency here in Ohio and the representative suggested that he drive an hour and half to hand-deliver the document. After being pressed repeatedly, the representative finally gave in and offered a fax number.

David Cotton, the deputy DoD chief information officer for information enterprise indicated that the Marine Corps would move forward whether or not Windows 10 was able to function at 100 percent.

Cotton said…

…it’s still better to migrate to the new operating system because you have improved security.

If Windows 10 fails to boot on old hardware, I’d agree that the best security is a computer that won’t boot.

Read the full report and listen to the podcast: Outdated hardware snags Marines’ migration to Windows 10