public sector

The Bureau of Meteorology’s much-criticised new website has blown out from an initially reported $4.1 million front-end redesign to a total bill of roughly $96.5 million — a revelation that has intensified political pressure, provoked alarm in regional communities that rely on the service, and...

Australia’s head of national security quietly used a generative AI chatbot to draft speeches and internal communications while the federal government simultaneously launched a sweeping “whole-of-government” AI plan that will push tools like Microsoft Copilot and a purpose-built GovAI assistant...

The UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) quietly closed a multi‑year IT modernisation chapter worth roughly £312 million — only for a significant portion of that investment to land squarely on an operating system that Microsoft officially stopped supporting on 14 October...

The Isle of Man Government says its desktop estate is being migrated to Windows 11 but the job won’t be finished until October 2026, leaving roughly two‑thirds of devices still on Windows 10 and covered only by paid Extended Security Updates (ESU) while migration continues. Background Windows 10...

In public-sector IT, timing is everything—and the UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has just provided a textbook case of what happens when procurement cycles, hardware reality, and vendor lifecycles collide: the department reports having spent approximately £312...

Benefits management is the single discipline that separates neat delivery checklists from real organisational change — it forces leaders to answer the only important question after a program finishes: did the transformation actually deliver the value we promised? RSM’s Canberra team lays out...

The UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) quietly disclosed that it has spent approximately £312 million modernising its IT estate — a programme that included removing 31,500 Windows 7 laptops and upgrading them to Windows 10, patching tens of thousands of vulnerabilities...

Oakland’s new AI pilot solicitation signals a decisive shift from internal policy-setting to real-world experimentation, offering no-cost, 16-week pilots to vendors and researchers on a slate of 30 city‑identified use cases aimed at improving access, efficiency, and transparency across municipal...

The International Criminal Court has quietly begun replacing Microsoft Office with openDesk, a European open‑source office and collaboration stack, in a move that crystallises a broader political and technical push across Europe to reduce dependence on U.S. cloud and productivity vendors. The...

Nine days after a high‑impact AWS outage, Microsoft’s Azure and Microsoft 365 environments suffered a separate, global degradation that again exposed how tightly the internet and public services are bound to a handful of hyperscalers—and why that concentration now reads like a strategic risk for...

Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has moved from pilot to platform: the utility announced a formal adoption and wider rollout of Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot, embedding generative AI across customer-facing channels and developer workflows as part of a broad...

South Africa’s Department of Justice and Constitutional Development was pushed into a partial IT blackout this month after a Windows 11 security rollup left critical recovery tools unusable on affected machines, exposing brittle patch-testing practices and the operational risks of platform...

A widespread Windows 11 failure tied to Microsoft’s October cumulative update has knocked critical systems offline at South Africa’s Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, creating service delays, complicating court processes, and exposing fragile update-testing practices in...

Kuwait’s government has moved from promise to program: officials and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership to build an AI‑powered Azure Region inside Kuwait, roll Microsoft 365 Copilot out across government, and seed a local AI innovation ecosystem — a suite of commitments the government...

Mohammed Bin Rashid Housing Establishment’s decision to run its core databases on Oracle Database@Azure marks a practical, high‑profile example of Dubai’s push to pair sovereign-grade services with cloud‑native AI and analytics — a move that promises better performance for planning, project and...

Schleswig‑Holstein’s IT team has completed a large‑scale migration that severs a major public‑sector dependency on Microsoft: more than 40,000 mailboxes and well over 100 million email and calendar items were moved off Microsoft Exchange and the Outlook client onto an Open‑Xchange backend and...

SAP and OpenAI’s announcement of “OpenAI for Germany” marks a decisive, deeply pragmatic attempt to square world‑class generative AI with Germany’s exacting demands for data sovereignty, public‑sector auditability and operational control. The partnership — a three‑way arrangement that positions...

The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation’s recent agency-wide orientation on Microsoft Copilot represents a pragmatic, low-friction approach to bringing generative AI into a high-risk public-sector workplace — one that balances productivity gains with governance controls, but which also...

Orange County’s IT shop has opened a formal conversation about moving major workloads off Microsoft Azure, issuing a Request for Information (RFI) that explicitly asks the market how to migrate applications, virtual machines, storage, databases and networking from Azure to another cloud — a move...

Ottawa’s recent disclosure that the federal government has spent nearly $1.3 billion on cloud services from U.S. providers since 2021 — with more than a billion of that directed to Microsoft and portions of that budget underpinning what the Department of National Defence calls “mission‑critical”...