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2. Ministry of Defence

• Quarter: Q4 2009
• Screens: 150,000
• Employees: 300,000
• Head of IT: John Taylor, director general of information
• Industry: Public sector
• Website: www.mod.uk

With reports suggesting that budgets may be cut by up to £5bn, the Ministry of Defence will have some challenging times ahead but it remains a huge IT spender. Gordon Brown's "statesmanship, not brinksmanship" policy, together with the scrapping of a Trident submarine, will help, but the back office and operations will also face a major overhaul.

In recent times, the MoD has faced incidents including data loss relating to details of forces members and potential recruits and the overrunning Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) project. DII is a project led by the Atlas consortium with EDS (now HP) as the lead and Microsoft providing a hefty technology component. It will mean that critical data can be accessed over a secure web link rather than sitting on the local drives of client devices. There was also heavy fire aimed at the MoD over a malfunctioning payroll system when a parliamentary committee said it and EDS had made "truly reprehensible" mistakes. And there was more trouble in store when a review said almost three in four systems failed security tests.

In 2009 the MoD signed a deal with Rackspace that will see the company provide a managed service for web-based recruitment. Earlier in the year it had to combat a virus that spread quickly through the forces. It also made news when it emerged that a document proposed the use of social media site to promote the forces.

The Ministry also rolled out an HR system with the aid of Capgemini and Microsoft. Called the Internet Access To Shared Services Portal, the site is intended to save £1m over 10 years.

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