US-based tech conglomerate Microsoft has launched a special version of Windows 10 operating system exclusively for the government officials in China on Tuesday. This brand new custom-made Windows 10 China Government Edition is all ready for use only to the country’s state-owned agencies.
So now the question arises, which agencies can avail the service of this custom-made operating system? According to Microsoft, this exclusive software will first be used by three Chinese government customers, including City of Shanghai, China Customs and government-authorised enterprise Westone Information Technology.The Redmond-based tech giant also mentioned that Lenovo would be one of the first OEM partners to preinstall the exclusive Windows 10 China Government Edition on the upcoming devices.
This custom-made Windows 10 edition has been designed based on the Windows 10 Enterprise Edition, which comes with various preinstalled features which cater identity, security, employment and manageability needs of both governments and enterprises. The executive vice president for Microsoft’s Windows and devices group, Terry Myerson mentioned in a blog post, “The China Government Edition will use these manageability features to remove features that are not needed by Chinese government employees.”
So what is the need of this custom made Windows 10 OS version? As the software is exclusively accessible to the Chinese government officials, the software will help them to use their own encryption technology in the operating system to lock down the confidential data which they don’t want to share with others. Not only that, the Chinese people will also not be able to access and store data on Microsoft’s cloud-based storage, named as OneDrive.
Not only China, the Australian Health Department, the Italian Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Defence also uses their respective custom-made version of the Windows 10. Last November, China introduced a controversial cybersecurity law, which demands foreign IT companies to share underlying software code of their products with the Chinese governments, and this law made the life of the American technology companies hard to do business in this Communist country.
But as China is a major internet power in this current era, Microsoft has come up with this custom-made operating system which ensures that there are no vulnerabilities which hackers can compromise.
