In the last two years, we’ve seen the narrative of public sector IT shift from digital transformation to digital survival. No amount of policy language can soften the hard truth that when a local authority’s Windows environment goes down, the community it serves goes down with it.
For residents depending on frontline services – from housing benefits to social care – an IT outage is more than a technical glitch. It’s a life-altering delay.
The NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) compliance is now a live expectation and the Government Cyber Action Plan has set a clear benchmark for 2026. With nearly 28% of the public sector estate still classified as legacy infrastructure, the vulnerability is a systemic risk to the communities they exist to serve.
Why traditional DR is falling short
Traditional disaster recovery (DR) often tries to rebuild the house using the same tools that let the fire in. Restoring servers and re-imaging Windows devices takes time, often weeks, that public services don’t have.
The most forward-thinking councils are reframing the problem with a “Broken Glass” Strategy: the deliberate construction of a secondary, immutable path to service delivery that exists entirely outside the vulnerable Windows estate
The trifecta of operational resilience
This parallel environment is powered by three key pillars:
- ChromeOS: A read-only, cloud-native OS that is architecturally immune to Windows-based ransomware. Verified boot and sandboxing prevent malicious payloads from executing and spreading.
- Cameyo by Google: This is the app bridge, containerising legacy Windows applications and delivers them securely through the browser and eliminating the need for clunky, slow and vulnerable VPNs.
- Chrome Enterprise Premium (CEP): The Zero Trust security layer that enforces deep Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and access controls in the browser to ensure that even if staff use shared or personal devices in a crisis, data remains secure.
Resilience without ‘rip-and-replace’
For many organisations, the barrier isn’t appetite, but the assumption that resilience requires new hardware. ChromeOS Flex removes that assumption entirely, transforming existing end-of-life Windows devices into secure, cloud-first recovery stations.
Sweating assets rather than replacing them, especially in the current IT procurement landscape, is the smarter, more sustainable choice.
