On Monday 8th April, organisations face the one year countdown to the end of extended Windows XP support. Despite much publicity from leading analyst houses and Microsoft itself strongly advising companies to migrate to the next OS, specifically Windows 7 or 8, many firms are still at a loss as to how to achieve this cost-effectively and efficiently before the scheduled end date, writes UK-based IT efficiency firm 1E.
According to recent research commissioned by 1E at the end of 2012, less than a quarter of UK respondents had completed the migration of their PC estate to Windows 7. Perhaps still more concerning is that just 40 percent claimed they were ‘in the process of upgrading’. As a result, IT departments now find themselves in what analysts call the migration ‘danger zone’, with little or no time left to complete the process before they are charged exorbitant support costs that will undoubtedly complicate budgets for many businesses.
Founder and CEO of 1E, Sumir Karayi, offers his views on why firms must migrate to Windows 7, as well as how they can do this with as little disruption to the business as possible, before they expose their IT systems to undue security risks.
"The message is loud and clear – organisations that are not yet off the starting blocks or only a little way down the track are highly unlikely to complete before the Microsoft deadline," says Karayi. "Whether the delay is because they misunderstood the sheer scale of the project, or that they are coming across myriad technical hurdles – from application reinstallation to gotchas around device drivers – which they never encountered before, it means they cannot confidently predict when they will finish the project or how much it will cost them. Ultimately, the challenge of such a project is that few IT teams will have ever experienced such a complex migration."
Karayi continues, "The traditional approach is to build a desk side visit into every upgrade. Many of the mainstream systems integrators will employ some automation on the repetitive tasks, but again still plan to visit every desktop. Our philosophy is to focus on fully automating the process across as many machines as possible rather than partially automating the process for every machine. This might sound like a trivial difference, but it leads to 80 to 90 percent reduction in desk side visits.
"This is critical because coordinating desk side visits is a massive logistical challenge that slows everything down. In fact, using this totally automated approach means organisations can deploy literally thousands of machines per day – completely hands free. This is the only way to get migrated within the available time."
