England’s health service has stuck two deals to extend its Microsoft licensing terms for just one month at a cost of around £8 million ($9.9 million).

Reseller deals with Insight Direct and Bytes were set to come to a close at the end of April, but both have been extended until the end of May to allow more time for replacement agreements to be put in place.

The contract with Insight Direct is a £3.47 million uplift to a £77.8 million ($96.8 million) deal launched in 2020 covering Microsoft products including Office 365 and Power BI, and was signed on April 26, according to a procurement notice.

A similar one with Bytes relates to a variety of Windows products and bags NHS England a month extension till May 31, at a cost of £4.6 million on an overall licensing agreement worth £163.1 million ($203 million), another notice said.

The extensions may reflect the complexity of renegotiating licenses upon which the NHS is utterly dependent. Observers will question whether the NHS couldn’t have got a better value for the £8 million extensions, given that they appear to have been negotiated in haste.

NHS England has been contacted for comment.

Microsoft, on the other hand, may feel it was a good day at the Office. It has imposed a salary freeze for full-time employees this year, owing to a “competitive environment while also facing global macroeconomic uncertainties,” according to CEO Satya Nadella.

Of course, Nadella’s own remuneration is set by the board. Last year it was revealed that he was getting a 10 percent pay rise to reach $55 million. Or more than one thousand times the salary of the average NHS nurse.

In the NHS, negotiations over nurses and doctors’ pay continue in a process fraught with industrial action. Unions claim real-term pay has fallen between 8 and 26 percent, and nurses recently voted to reject a 5 percent pay rise.

Estimates suggest NHS England will post a combined deficit of around £600 million ($747 million) on a budget of around £160 billion ($199 billion) for the current financial year while Microsoft’s net income for 2022 was $72.7 billion on revenue of $198 billion.

An NHS spokesperson said: “These national agreements to use Microsoft products have already saved the NHS hundreds of millions of pounds in recent years. They have been extended to allow extra time to complete a full procurement process which will also save money in the long-term for taxpayers.”

The British security researcher who helped stop the NHS-crippling malware attack earlier this year has pleaded not guilty to hacking charges in the United States.

According to his lawyers, Marcus Hutchins, from Devon, will “vigorously defend himself” and be “fully vindicated” when his case goes to trial.

He was arrested in Las Vegas and charged with developing Kronos – malware allegedly designed to steal banking logins and other financial information – in early August.

The case is unrelated to the WannaCry attack that struck the NHS and 300,000 computers around the world in May, for which Mr Hutchins gained worldwide attention after he detected a “kill switch” that effectively disabled the virus.

Mr Hutchins has been released on conditional bail with a $30,000 (£23,000) cash bond which was provided by “a variety of sources”, according to his former attorney Adrian Lobo.

He will now be represented by Brian Klein of law firm Baker Marquart and Marcia Hofmann of Zeitgeist Law.

Speaking outside the court, Ms Hofmann said: “Marcus Hutchins is a brilliant young man and a hero.

“He is going to vigorously defend himself against these charges and when the evidence comes to light we’re confident that he will be fully vindicated.”

Strict bail conditions were modified to allow Mr Hutchins to use a computer for work, having been banned from using the internet at an earlier hearing.

He can also now travel around the US and live in Los Angeles, so he can be near his legal team ahead of his trial in October.

Mr Klein said: “We are very pleased today that the court modified his terms allowing him to return to his important work.”

The researcher was previously urged to do a deal by supporters who feared the conditions he could be imprisoned under in the US.

The Barts Health NHS Trust is a system of three district general hospitals staffing over 15,000 employees serving 2.5 million patients in east London.

The Health Service Journal reports that the attack affected thousands of files hosted on the hospital group’s Windows XP operating system, and the file sharing system between departments has been turned off, according to the Telegraph.

Last year, ransomware attacks against Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Hospitals forced them to shut down systems and cancel operations for four days.

They were infected with a variant known as Globe2, which commonly infects users via phishing emails containing malicious links, according to ZDNet.