The Migration Problem

An average enterprise replaces the workstations with brand new hardware every 3 years. When performing this migration, you need to preserve the existing user environments, while getting the full benefit of the new hardware - performance, features and, most importantly, reliability.

So how do you do this? How do you move your many users to the new hardware? After all, you have to preserve all the existing user data, applications, settings, look and feel - everything that makes them productive. One way would be to create a "golden image" for the new hardware, and deploy it for all your users - but that will barely work for task-based employees, and won't cut it for knowledge workers - the backbone of the company.

And you can't exactly copy your systems from the old hard drive to the new one - even if we forget the complexity of the task, the OS just won't boot on the hardware.

How do we solve this?

The problem with The Image

A common practice employed for performing hardware upgrades is the use a standard system image, which is deployed on all new workstations. This image, or several images, is prepared on the new hardware, includes some globally used applications such as MS Office, and some general network configurations.

Although it may seem as an easy way out, it does not provide a real solution - not for the users, and not even for IT itself.

Let's examine the interests of IT staff and end-users in this process:

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

When you deploy the same image over and over again, your users' environment is changed. Their settings and configurations disappear. The specific apps each one of them needs aren't there anymore. Even data may be lost - after all, no matter the policy, personal and corporate files are still stored locally on the workstation.

Users become frustrated and non-productive. They call support - raising the call volume, and creating more work for IT: installing the needed applications, performing configurations, adjusting to the new environment.

Image-based strategy is easy only on paper. In reality, each user goes through a very painful process - and makes sure IT feels it, too.