Windows 7: Unleash the Power

Editor's Notes

• #4: We brought up the challenges of the mobile worker before and everyone has probably seen or experienced each of these scenarios here. The one question I want to ask here as you do move to Windows 7 is, will the OS migration in and of itself, solve these problems? In my experience with customers, the answer is no. When today’s typical worker is more ‘mobile’ than ever before, these problems are not going away. These challenges directly affect people’s ability to be productive and increase risk to an organization. But the OS migration does present a unique opportunity to solve the way we address these problems today.--------------------------------------So let’s look at a few common scenarios that make that mobile worker challenging to manage.For the new worker, IT had to secure their laptop, get them their apps, and typically configure it from a back office room somewhere. But if a worker is not in the office, which many of today’s workers aren’t, they could be across the country and trying to use their home PC but when they started day 1, they still had to use personal webmail to communicate with their new colleagues until they could get their boxes a few days later and hopefully not a week or two. They probably got their phone in 1-2 days because the phone vendor just drop shipped it or they just went out to the local store and bought one. But their PC, they had to wait.Then for all of us that have encountered the “broken” PC. We had to go back to scratch and hope that our apps and data were backed up somewhere by someone. Your experience was probably similar to the New worker except now you had data and personalized stuff you hoped you would get back.For the really unfortuante that have lost a laptop or had one stolen, there were security worries there as well. This is an absolutely true story…we had a guy fall asleep in his room at a conference and there was a theif that was checking hotel rooms. Well, his room happened to be open and the guy walked in an stole the laptop when my co-worker was dead asleep. Hotel security actually got the guys face and he was caught later but many publicized stories are not so fortunate. Then on top of that you have the problem that the last guy had which was getting your laptop or another laptop back that was configured the same way it was when you lost it.For those of us who currently use multiple PCs (or maybe you just want to use your PC at home because it’s faster), you have dropbox accounts or usb drives so you can keep them it sync. If you want to use your netbook on a plane, you might not be able to because you’re missing corporate apps or docs. And from an IT management story, these additional devices are a nightmare to manage. I can’t patch your home machine or enforce you to have AV so you can save a word doc with a macro virus in it and bring it back into our environment and your laptop doesn’t have the latest AV def files, we’re in a world of hurt.
• #6: Evolution of mobile phone (personal expensive, corporate controlled,choices now exist between IT & employee)Evolution of mobile PC (personal expensive, corporate controlled, choice will exist called vDesk)When you look at the two devices that your typical worker can’t live without, the phone and the PC, these two devices have taken two separate evolutionary paths that past few years. IT has largely gotten out of the business of managing mobile phones. Users can not typically use a portal provided by the wireless providers or just stop in a store and have a device setup for them in a few minutes. They can then personalize the device and connect it to certain corporate systems typically without IT’s help.The PC on the other hand requires significant interaction by internal resources before reaching the end user. So the bottom line is…. . How can IT evolve mobile PC management in a way that phones have? We believe there is a way to evolve your mobile PC management methods to support all these initiatives and we’ll tell you in a few minutes how some of our customers are doing it today.ShortenAs we look at this increasing mobile worker population, you can say that the two devices that the mobile workforce count on are our phone and our PC. When you look at the evolution of how we manage the mobile phone, you can see that it’s evolved much quicker. The original mobile phones were corporate controlled and very expensive. As they became less expensive and vendors provided ways of self service, most IT organizations got out of the business of managing phones and left them to the telecom vendors. Users now have a choice of their phone and they use certain security protocols to do things like check their email. When we look at laptops though, the users have obviously changed but how we manage the deployment for users hasn’t really changed that much. You can argue that it’s become more complex. Now-a-day, people bring their netbooks and want to connect to the corporate network and travel with it because it’s lighter. You may have users asking you to support their Macs. Many people have consultants that come in and need network or application access and want it on their own machines. Users have their personal apps and content they’ve downloaded on their machines. Companies with “green” initiatives want to offer “work at home” solutions. Last winter’s H1N1 scare and the snow-in around the DC area forced companies to start thinking about how to empower their workers to be equally effective if working remotely. Shrinking budgets also forced companies to re-evaluate one of their biggest expenditures, real estate and all the associated costs that go along with it
• #7: So why change now?The windows 7 migration presents a great opportunity for organizations to change the status quo. Gartner presents a set of steps and a high level plan to help with the migration. The bottom line is that organizations are being forced to re-evaluate almost everything. The entire technology stack that potentially impacts the end user must be evaluated. As I helped customers go through the phases of planning and set the standards, create those images and begin testing, the question I started to hear was…hey, are we migrating to Win7 or winXP again? If you look at the process above, it’s not really clear whether this is an XP or Win7 migration. There has to be a better way to do this so we don’t run into those same problems we saw with the mobile population during the XP days. You see the quote up there from Gartner about simplifying management. But how do you do that if you want to support PCs that you don’t procure internally or when vendors start changing components that aren’t picked up by plug ‘n play? Also, the question is being asked, ‘do we need all that technology still’? And are there now technologies that didn’t exist when we created the current infrastructure that would allow us to evolve towards supporting these new initiatives in a more cost efficient and simpler architecture. I believe you can shorten the engineering phase in the middle if you do simplify the way you manage machines going forward. The way you shorten that time it takes to test deployment of Win7 in today’s era of computing is through the creation & deployment of a secure, hardware agnostic virtual workspace.
• #8: So why change now?The windows 7 migration presents a great opportunity for organizations to change the status quo. Gartner presents a set of steps and a high level plan to help with the migration. The bottom line is that organizations are being forced to re-evaluate almost everything. The entire technology stack that potentially impacts the end user must be evaluated. As I helped customers go through the phases of planning and set the standards, create those images and begin testing, the question I started to hear was…hey, are we migrating to Win7 or winXP again? If you look at the process above, it’s not really clear whether this is an XP or Win7 migration. There has to be a better way to do this so we don’t run into those same problems we saw with the mobile population during the XP days. You see the quote up there from Gartner about simplifying management. But how do you do that if you want to support PCs that you don’t procure internally or when vendors start changing components that aren’t picked up by plug ‘n play? Also, the question is being asked, ‘do we need all that technology still’? And are there now technologies that didn’t exist when we created the current infrastructure that would allow us to evolve towards supporting these new initiatives in a more cost efficient and simpler architecture. I believe you can shorten the engineering phase in the middle if you do simplify the way you manage machines going forward. The way you shorten that time it takes to test deployment of Win7 in today’s era of computing is through the creation & deployment of a secure, hardware agnostic virtual workspace.
• #9: These are some of those things that Gartner said you have to test when preparing for migration. Over the years, When I would help customers prepare a process and architecture for laptop deployment, there was a big technology stack involved. They would get a PC with an OS from the OEM but typically re-wipe it with a corporate OS version that had the base apps installed. Sometimes they’d go through the FDE process first. The system would go through some cycle of security patching, application updates and GPO updates. Of course, if you have different hardware, you likely had a different image or you had to maintain a driver database and the whole driver injection process. Then additional agents such as backup or PC management agents were added and THEN…the user could have their machine. There was no way to separate the user’s “workspace” (those applications and data they needed to do their job) from the OS or the hardware so everything I did was specific to that OS, to that machine and this resulted in the architecture or long manual processes many of you go through today. With vDesk, there is a way now to consolidate some legacy technololgies and more quickly deliver a high-performance virtual workspace, that has the same features you architected for in the XP days.
• #10: These are some of those things that Gartner said you have to test when preparing for migration. Over the years, When I would help customers prepare a process and architecture for laptop deployment, there was a big technology stack involved. They would get a PC with an OS from the OEM but typically re-wipe it with a corporate OS version that had the base apps installed. Sometimes they’d go through the FDE process first. The system would go through some cycle of security patching, application updates and GPO updates. Of course, if you have different hardware, you likely had a different image or you had to maintain a driver database and the whole driver injection process. Then additional agents such as backup or PC management agents were added and THEN…the user could have their machine. There was no way to separate the user’s “workspace” (those applications and data they needed to do their job) from the OS or the hardware so everything I did was specific to that OS, to that machine and this resulted in the architecture or long manual processes many of you go through today. With vDesk, there is a way now to consolidate some legacy technololgies and more quickly deliver a high-performance virtual workspace, that has the same features you architected for in the XP days.
• #11: vDesk simplifies the creation, deployment & management of your Windows 7 environment through the use of a Fast, Mobile and Secure virtual workspace.
• #12: vDesk allows me to leverage the host Windows 7 OS on any system you buy from an online or brick and mortar retailer. Leveraging the Host OS is an important distinction for those of you familiar with other virtualization tools out there like Vmware Workstation. Not requiring another OS means better performance and less overhead and we’ll show you some of that in the demo. So a user can bring their own PC in from Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc or IT can use any Windows 7 box they get and doesn’t have to wait for that specific model or wasted time recreating an image for a different model. And I can deploy for them an encrypted workspace layer that contains my relevant corporate applications. This virtual workspace can reside on a USB drive, a laptop, a home PC, or a netbook. If you think of the way people use USB drives and are able to port them from one machine to another, the virtual workspace works in a very similar fashion. This virtual workspace is significantly smaller than your average desktop/laptop image and allows me to still do all the things I would typically need to do on the physical hardware. This includes 1) Domain joins, 2) VPN connections, 3) Group Policies and the ability to synchronize the changes to this virtual workspace back to corporate storage locations (which by the way don’t have to be the expensive types of storage you may be using for your virtualization projects). Organizations looking to deploy Windows 7 get the benefits of of things like centralized security, and backup while users absolutely love the performance of vDesk over the traditional burdensome technologies that slow their PC down. In fact, I’ll show you where on our website you can see the performance test we did with a 3D graphics renedering application.------------------------------just notes below. Not using.SecurityEncrypted Container secures the user workspaceWithout Hassles of Full Disk EncryptionPerformanceRun performance intensive voice/video applications Leverage local processor, graphics and sound cardI’ll show you a place on our website where you can see this for yourselfAgility Virtual Workspace is Centralized Management and backed up.Restore users in 10-20% of the time it currently takesEmployee can access corporate desktop from any Windows 7 PC: laptop, netbook, or a USB driveCost SavingsEliminate complex back-office requirementsEliminate costs for encryption and backup softwareEnables employee-owned laptop program, and can eliminate the need for IT to purchase new devices for all employeesEmpowering those employees also supports green initiatives, pandemic planning and real estate consolidation projects.
• #15: As we take a look at the impact this has on the problems we mentioned earlier, the deployment of Windows 7 through the virtual workspace has several positive impacts on managing the mobile workforce.IT can provision new users easily with a corporate workspace that is encrypted, backed up and adheres to corporate security policies. Employees with their own PCs or work at home users can have a secure workspace and use the host for personal computing. Users who have problems with a host system due to patching or malware….. ….have a hard drive replaced…or just want that shiny new laptop they saw, they can also get their workspace back in 10% the time it takes today to get that user back up and running. And this is with their apps, corporate apps, their data and personalization as well as a secure container within which to work. Users who lose their laptop also are assured their sensitive data resides inside the encrypted workspace.Mobile users now can work off a USB device so they can plug it into their work computer, then take it on the plane with a netbook and plug it into a presentation desktop at the conference. All of course, while having that device managed so that it can be replaced as needed.
• #16: A top Fortune 500 bank put vDesk through the paces over a year ago and did their own comparison measuring everything from performance, cost, security, and mobility. vDesk was their clear choice to solve their pandemic planning needs. ING wanted to make sure users affected by the potential H1N1 flu season would still be able to assume “business as usual” duties even if their branch/location was quarantined. Even thought the flu season never got as bad as expected, by deploying vDesk on a portable encrypted drive, they were able to deliver a mobile computing solution to their end users who loved the performance. Also, they saved a significant amount compared to buying duplicate hardware, building out an expensive infrastructure and maintain it.
• #17: “We achieved a 7-to-1 cost savings using vDesk over thin-terminals.”Marc Robinson, Vice President of IT at Cloud 10 CorporationCloud 10, a leading virtual call center company, that now deploys their at-home workers with vDesk. “It is absolutely our mission to keep jobs in the US. vDesk is helping Cloud 10 keep overhead costs down and as a result, we are able to pass the savings onto our customers,” says Marc Robinson of IT Operations. Case study: http://www.ringcube.com/portal/content/files/casestudies/cs_cloud10.pdf
• #18: So just as a summary before we get to the demo is that we’d love to help your organization unleash the power of Windows 7 through the vDesk virtual workspace and to help you get started…