The Migration Problem

Today's enterprise IT faces the rapidly increasing challenge of managing the data in the enterprise, and serving the growing user needs.

IT administrators constantly need to:

• Centrally manage all corporate laptops and desktops
• Move applications, data and personalization settings to new computers and/or OSs
• Preserve and protect personalized user environments
  
• Troubleshoot and resolve desktop personalization configuration issues

This is a costly, time-consuming work. Each user has specific applications crucial for his work, specific settings and a personalized environments, and managing all these becomes excruciatingly hard.

This problem leads to the rising interest in an alternative - Desktop Virtualization. Virtualization is seen as the Holy Grail of enterprise IT. Virtualization is expected to solve the user management problems, simplify data center management and even reduce carbon emissions.

What stops the enterprise from embracing wide-spread virtualization?

The major problem is a very simple question: "How do we get from here - to there?". How do we take a corporate network, with hundreds and thousands of PCs, and virtualize it all - without harming productivity and threatening user productivity?

Losing their personalized desktops is traumatic for the users. IT is forced to invest substantially in re-personalizing the user desktops, and application incompatibility and user rejection risks are increased. A too sharp move to VDI is a business continuity and productivity risk.

So how do we migrate from an existing, personalized, physical environment to a virtualized one - while preserving the user environments intact?

Balancing the interests

This migration process can be seen as a balancing of IT and End-user interests.

IT interests:

From SMB to LE, IT needs to provide the best experience for the users – while cutting down costs. To do this, IT staff wants to:

• Eliminate desk-side visits
• Reduce support tickets
• Reduce time spent on software installations and configurations

User interests:

• Dislike changes
• Do not care about hidden directories, registry, proxies, DLLs, roaming profiles
• Do not care about OSs
• Only care about having the apps they want, working exactly as they want