Microsoft may have officially pulled the plug on Windows XP,
but organizations that want to keep enduring the operating system on
life support have to pay up. In the case of the U.S. Internal Revenue
Service (IRS), it is taxpayers who are footing the bill.
The agency is paying Microsoft less than $500,000 to support its 58,000 Windows XP systems, according to an April 11 report in
Computerworld.
At less than $9 per PC, the figure not only falls well below estimates
of millions of dollars that quickly made the rounds online, but also
comes in far under the price businesses can expect to pay to keep their
Windows XP systems bug-free as time drags on.
Businesses can expect to pay $200 per PC for Windows XP support this
year, according to Sumir Karayi, CEO of 1E, an IT software and services
firm. "This means that from April 2014, a company with 5000 computers
still on Windows XP would be looking at a bill from Microsoft of $1
million for support alone," he told
eWEEK.
The IRS had already switched 52,000 workstations over to Windows 7 ahead of the deadline, reported
The Washington Post recently. The remaining Windows XP will have no impact on taxpayers' ability to file their returns, asserted the IRS.
Funding, not negligence, caused the agency to miss Microsoft's
deadline, indicated IRS Commissioner John Koskinen during an April 7
budget hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on
Financial Services and General Government. The IRS faces an estimated
$300 million shortfall on IT projects, $30 million of which is required
to upgrade the remaining Windows XP PCs to Windows 7. The IRS has an
annual budget of approximately $11 billion and employs 90,000 workers.
Dire warnings from Microsoft and security professionals regarding
the unsupported OS did not fall on deaf ears at the IRS. In his
testimony, Koskinen said his agency is "very concerned" that not
completing the transition away from Windows XP can have security
implications and cause an "unstable environment" at the agency.
Microsoft stopped supporting the 12-year-old desktop OS on April 8,
putting an end to the monthly tradition of issuing security patches and
bug fixes for Windows XP. While XP users have no reason to panic yet,
the future does not bode well for the OS.
Tim Rains, director of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group, recently
warned that even surfing the Web on a Windows XP system may soon
compromise its security. "New exploits for Windows XP will likely be
added to cybersecurity exploit kits that are sold/leased to attackers,"
he wrote in a
Microsoft Security Blog
post. Those kits will make it a trivial matter for attackers to pump
out "malicious websites that try to install malware on systems that
visit those sites," he added.
