DOD, 'for the most part,' completes Windows 10 migration

By Justin Doubleday / April 3, 2018 at 12:39 PM

The Defense Department has migrated nearly all of its offices to Windows 10, completing a lengthy and sometimes torturous process.

Acting DOD CIO Essye Miller announced the milestone today during an industry day in National Harbor, MD. The Pentagon had set a deadline for all DOD components to migrate their office IT systems to Windows 10 by March 31.

"For the most part, with the exception of a couple [offices], we are there," Miller said.

"We'll spend sometime this morning with the deputy secretary just congratulating folks for their hard work," she added. "It's been a long, long, long journey."

Former Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work had originally set a deadline of January 2017 for Windows 10 migration. In a February 2016 memo laying out the order, Work said the decision was "based on the need to strengthen our cyber security posture while concurrently streamlining the IT operating environment."

But DOD missed that deadline. The DOD CIO's office, working through its cyber score card process, helped the military services prioritize their investments and set a new deadline of March 2018, Miller told reporters in September 2017 following a conference in Washington.

"It gives it the level of visibility that it needs to drive to the expected outcome," Miller said of the scorecard then. "Windows 10 obviously postures us on a security operating environment and that's what we want."

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