Defense Department employees encouraged to use Windows 10 at home

Microsoft Windows 10 is making a name for itself in all branches of government, starting with the Marine Corps, whose upgrade to Windows 10 is underway for over 120,000 devices.

The US Department of Defense is next, with a massive upgrade of almost 4 million PCs. Terry Halvorsen, CIO at the Pentagon has voiced his enthusiasm in favor of the operating system, and commented that DOD employees would benefit from using the operating system at home as well.

Halvorsen’s motivation for recommending Windows 10, has to do with the amount of security baked into the operating system, especially as this is the first time that the DOD has an operating system truly secure from the ground up.

Microsoft Windows 10 is one of the first operating systems to support hardware encryption used by the latest Intel Skylake architectures, as well as full and selective encryption of all data stored within a system, including attached flash drives and external drives.

The ability to sign into devices using facial recognition, fingerprints and other biometric methods, is also a range of features that falls right into the DoD’s ballpark.

Both Microsoft and the Pentagon are confident that all 4 million devices will be upgraded by January 2017, and according to Halvorsen: “...[Army CIO Robert] Ferrell and I are in 100 percent agreement, as are the leadership of the Army and the [DOD] secretary, that our role remains to get Windows 10 in a year..."

While one year seems to be an oddly optimistic deadline, Halvorsen seems determined to complete the upgrade, while mentioning that there could be repercussions for those departments that fail to meet the deadline.

The pressure is on the US government, following ongoing criticism about the outdated status of computer systems across the entire infrastructure and networks. The criticism comes also amidst an influx of cyber-attacks of unseen severity up until a few years ago, particularly in reference to ransomware.