Accelerate Windows desktop migrations with AppSense

Accelerate Windows desktop migrations with AppSense

Accelerate Windows desktop migrations with AppSense Contents Overview 3 Key challenges 3 Solution overview 4 User profile & data 5 User profile 5-6 User data 7 Application remediation 8 Application configuration 8 Privilege management 8 Benefits & savings 9 Forrester TEI study validates AppSense s ROI 9 AppSense customer validation 10 Partners 10 2

Overview Key challenges Today many organizations are faced with an urgent need to migrate to a modern desktop to ensure that they remain supported, secure and capable of consuming services in a rapidly changing world. With the compelling event of Windows XP End of Life (EoL) rapidly approaching, organizations are faced with the challenge of a rapid migration to avoid two undesirable choices: 1. Pay for an expensive custom support agreement 2. Accept the risk of running unsupported and un-patched operating systems This presents many organizations with a number of challenges in how to rapidly migrate towards a modern desktop, including understanding more about the desktop estate in three main areas: Applications Data User Profile AppSense, together with its partners, is uniquely positioned to help customer s address these challenges and migrate rapidly towards a modern desktop at a lower cost and complexity. Importantly, with the approach discussed in this paper there are significant postdeployment cost savings and strategic business enablement capabilities not found in any other solution on the market today. A poll in a recent Ovum webinar revealed that 54% of respondents saw complexity as the biggest barrier to successful migration to Windows 7. Managing multiple variables across a variety of devices for thousands of users across many locations can be complex and problematic unless adequate planning is undertaken and solutions put in place. The migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 is fraught with technical, logistical and operational challenges, not limited to: The large application investment that needs to be prioritized and assessed for suitability for migration The complexity of remediating application compatibility issues The expense of migrating user data and profile Endpoint devices are often massively distributed, frequently across an entire country in various locations User downtime during the day is not possible. Migrations must occur after hours typically at higher hourly contract rates The added complexity of including desktop and application virtualization as part of the project 3

Accelerate Windows desktop migrations with AppSense Solution overview Together, AppSense DesktopNow and DataNow ensure a seamless and accelerated migration of users to new desktops. These solutions add value in three ways: 1. Assisting to migrate the profile from the endpoint By automatically capturing the user profile from existing desktops and storing this data centrally in a highly scalable infrastructure, then re-applying them on-demand IT departments can automatically migrate the user profile (or selective parts of the profile) to hundreds of thousands of users using any new modern desktop, regardless of device or location. This also provides substantial benefits beyond the migration phase, as users can now move between different desktops, either physical or virtual, with a follow me experience for their profile and data. 2. Migration of data between the desktops Data is arguably one of the most important assets to both the user and the business. For years users have saved their files, documents and data in a myriad of locations across the desktop, document folders, home drives, network shares, removable drives and most recently, public cloud services. AppSense helps gather all existing user data and centrally store it in existing IT storage infrastructure where it is then made available to the user as part of their new modern desktop, on any device, in any location. 3. Application remediation There are numerous challenges in preparing applications for the new desktop that AppSense can help to address. Decouple application settings from the package itself, meaning a cost and time reduction in Application package customization. Automated modification of application configurations based on the destination OS Dynamically elevated user privileges for applications requiring administrative rights Thousands of unique, monolithic, managed desktops Decouple ALL aspects of the user for ALL desktops and centralize Apply persona on-demand to reliably and securely achieve seamless user experience from lower cost, standard desktop assets AppSense enables transition from traditional stack to standard, leveraged images further reducing management costs 4

User profile & data AppSense provides a simple, centralized and managed solution for migrating user profile and data from their existing Windows XP desktop to the modern desktop of Windows 7 & 8. IT departments can apply policies to control the environment and ensure that a consistent user experience is delivered to each user regardless of how their desktop is delivered. User Settings DesktopNow User Settings Windows XP Windows 7 Policies User Data DataNow User Data User profile Migrating users to a modern desktop can present a challenge with user profiles. Users typically have their desktops set up to provide them with the most efficient way of working and over time they will have configured their workspaces to suit their own methods of working efficiently. When moving between desktop operating systems with AppSense, particularly if migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 and beyond, IT departments have the opportunity to define which settings move with the user, and also which settings are persisted after each change. Whilst there are tools available to help automate this process such as the User State Migration Tool (USMT) from Microsoft, they are often cumbersome, require extensive scripting and need to be run at the point of migration. This is inefficient, impacts user productivity and makes the entire process costly due to the operational cost overhead. Typically this procedure takes place out of hours, usually at a higher contract rate, and in many environments requires downtime. This often results in the migration of the user profile and user data being migrated in batches as the Windows 7 desktop is being deployed to keep the user impact and cost to a minimum. Additionally, tools such as USMT do not provide for the on-going portability of users between desktop environments e.g. between physical and virtual desktop sessions. With AppSense, the process is completely different. To begin collection of the user profile and data, organizations simply deploy the DesktopNow agents to their current desktop to synchronize all of the details of the users environment inclusive of both OS and applications. Policies and restrictions can be configured centrally to define settings can migrate to the new desktop. Settings are synchronized in real time and do not require the users to log off. 5

Accelerate Windows desktop migrations with AppSense During the physical deployment of the new Windows 7 desktop, a user can simply stop working on their old Windows XP desktop and seamlessly switch to their new modern desktop. Their environment for both OS and applications can be configured exactly as their old desktop, from wallpaper and icon layouts, to Office ribbon configuration, email signatures and custom dictionaries, allowing users to be immediately productive and focus on gaining the benefits of the new desktop without having to rebuild their workspace first. Any changes that the user makes in their new desktop are again centrally managed ensuring that, whichever device they choose to work from, users settings are completely portable. Post migration benefit As part of a migration to a new desktop, policies can be introduced that limit or enforce specific user experiences. From something as simple as defining the desktop wallpaper for a particular department, to controlling the availability of specific application features based on the location of the user, all of this can be defined with DesktopNow policies. Deploying a policy driven approach to end user experience can dramatically increase the performance of a users desktop. One very clear example of this is in improving logon times. Implementation of DesktopNow to manage the user environment allows for the removal of logon scripts. By eliminating the need to connect every resource a user may possibly require at the point they logon and simply connecting those resources when required, such as on application launch, can have dramatic results. In real world deployments, customers have seen reduction of logon times from several minutes to a matter of seconds leading to a clearly measurable increase in productivity. AppSense DesktopNow also provides the means for IT departments to rollback user settings at a very granular level. Self service rollback can be presented directly to the users via a web portal, if required, allowing the IT helpdesk workload to be off loaded through self-service. In cases where helpdesks are still engaged, organizations typically see a reduction in call handling times for profile / persona issues reduced from 2 hours to under 15 minutes. Immediately demonstrating a substantial reduction in overheads for profile and persona support through the implementation of DesktopNow. 6

User data Ensuring that data is safely migrated from the old desktop is critical to a successful migration. Though organizations frequently have policies in place regarding data storage and users are guided to store documents, files etc on central file shares it is typically the case that a user stores their data locally. Folder re-direction within the OS can often help to address some of these challenges, though it may not have been implemented as Windows XP s implementation of folder redirection and offline files introduces a robustness issue that many organizations have had issues with in the past. AppSense DataNow provides organizations with a robust data access solution that ensures that a users data is synchronized in real-time between the users desktop and existing central file shares. The organization can simply leverage their existing storage without buying anything extra. In it s simplest implementation a user has a single directory on their Windows PC that is synchronized automatically with their network share. As a user moves their documents into this folder the system replicates that data to the file server. The data is retained within the organizations own network or can optionally also leverage cloud-based storage such as Azure. Further to this, AppSense DesktopNow can be used to set the synchronisation folder to be the default location that applications save data to, and if appropriate IT departments can use DesktopNow to prevent data being saved to any other location through restricting the application behavior. When a user moves to their new desktop, the data is immediately available to them in the same folders and locations they had saved it to previously ensuring that the user can continue to work from the moment they logon. Post migration benefit There are further benefits to implementing DataNow in an organization, post deployment. With the data now being centrally stored means that it can now be accessed and utilized on a persons Windows desktop, ios, Mac or Android device. This can all be implemented without the need for VPN or virtual desktop solutions. Allowing secure use of tablets and smartphones whilst retaining policy driven control of the data allows organizations to make full use of their new desktop and the broad range of devices available to users today in a secure and centrally managed way. 7

Accelerate Windows desktop migrations with AppSense Application remediation AppSense DesktopNow can help to address application related challenges in a number of ways. Application configuration DesktopNow enables IT departments to decouple user and application settings from the application package itself. This simplifies the packaging process and allows for modifications to be made that address cross platform compatibility issues. By injecting personalization and application settings into the package at the user level an organization needs only create a single centralized application package, effectively decoupling the application settings and configuration from the package. This allows an organization to create a single instance of a packaged application and to create dynamic policies to address the variations in the underlying operating systems to address compatibility. The result is a reduction in cost of packaging and servicing, customized per user audience. Privilege management Another major challenge to application compatibility is the need for many poorly written applications to run with admin rights. As organizations are move to a modern desktop, a key shift in the security of the platform has been to implement least privilege and reduce the use of administrative rights. However, implementation of technology such as User Account Control (UAC) since Windows Vista introduces challenges where applications require elevated privileges simply to run. Whilst some may choose to address this by continuing to provide admin privileges to their users, presenting a security risk to the desktop and wider environment, there is a better way. AppSense Application Manager can granularly manage the selective use of admin rights, elevating privileges where a process requires it and limiting those rights to the specific processes whilst maintaining the lower level of privilege for the rest of the user s session. It is important to understand which applications require admin rights. AppSense provides the User Rights Discovery tool allowing IT departments to quickly identify specific processes that require elevated permissions. Desktop managers can then define a very tight privilege management policy to ensure that Admin rights are only applied to the necessary process and withheld from the rest of the user session. Post migration benefit In addition to helping to address application compatibility issues there are additional benefits to implementing AppSense technologies for privilege management. Efficient and dynamic privilege management helps bolster security and trim costs. Leading IT analyst firm Gartner states that organizations using multiple levels of lockdown will reduce desktop TCO by 24%. And by controlling admin rights at a granular level, IT departments can provide users with the least number of privileges needed to perform their tasks and run their applications, enhancing desktop security. 8

Benefits & savings There are numerous benefits to using DesktopNow to help speed migration from Windows XP towards a modern desktop based on Windows 7 or Windows 8. The process of migrating the user, their profile and data can be seamlessly managed and dramatically streamlined, avoiding a big bang approach to Windows 7 migration. The automation of processes can reduce the cost of out of hours work, helping to control the overall project costs and in addition brings further benefits for both IT departments and users in the longer term. In addition, the ability to dynamically enforce licensing of applications in virtual environments to allow applications only to run when accessed from licensed devices can considerably reduce the cost of licensing applications where Desktop Virtualization forms part of the modern desktop. Forrester TEI study validates AppSense s ROI In March 2012, AppSense commissioned Forrester Consulting to independently examine the total economic impact and potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying AppSense DesktopNow (formerly the AppSense Management Suite) for various use cases, including Windows 7 migrations. The results are published in the paper Forrester Total Economic Impact of the AppSense Management Suite on December 2012. In-depth interviews with existing customers of various deployment sizes ranging from 2,800 to 20,000 users, across various industry sectors including Petrochemical, Education, Retail and Healthcare. The financial analysis found that a composite 2500 seats organization based on the aggregate model of these 5 companies experienced the risk-adjusted ROI, costs, and benefits shown in below: Forrester found that project-based cost savings can be realized for the migration from Windows XP to Windows 7, as well as physical to virtual migrations. With many experiencing reductions in the following areas: Number of contractors required to help cover IT service delivery and helpdesk while existing full-time IT staff focused on the Windows migration Time spent analyzing existing desktops and migrating user settings Travel required between locations during migration phases Reduction in post migration support calls, user downtime and costs Capital expenditure for hardware and application license requirements ROI Payback period Total benefits (PV) Total costs (PV) Net present value 284% 5 months $2,399,016 ($625,095) $1,773,921 9

Accelerate Windows desktop migrations with AppSense AppSense customer validation Partners By taking a people-centric approach with AppSense user virtualization, we migrate up to three times as many desktops per day using the same level of IT resource. And more importantly, no disruption to our staff. Our investment in AppSense will continue to pay dividends when we migrate to future operating systems beyond Windows 7 having already virtualized our users, we will continue to receive the same or improved benefits in terms of speed, reduced cost and complexity and a better user experience. Ian Cawson, Technical Architect at The Co-operative Group. AppSense user virtualization delivered the exact solution we needed to confidently migrate to Windows 7 without affecting the user experience. What AppSense has provided us with is a pain-free end user migration, additionally it future proofs our design. Jake Muszynski at Nationwide Children s Hospital. AppSense enables us to deliver to our staff and student body during the migration phase and beyond - AppSense will facilitate a shift to a more usercentric model that not only supports our current needs, but also provides the means for IT to enable a strategic transformation of the ICT infrastructure in the future. Rob Arnold, Head of Customer IT Support at University of Birmingham Utilizing the power of AppSense DesktopNow and DataNow in combination with technology from other partners can further assist in accelerating migrations, avoiding the cost of Windows XP custom support and increasing ROI from the new desktop. From profiling the existing desktop, to remediating and packaging applications for deployment, AppSense technology partners have solutions that when combined with AppSense DesktopNow and DataNow provide dramatic benefits to the management of the new desktop, and help to move IT departments to the position where future migrations become completely seamless. For more information about AppSense technology partners and the value they provide visit: http://www.appsense.com/partners/ strategic-partners/ 10

appsense.com email us: iwanttoknowmore@appsense.com About AppSense AppSense, the people-centric computing company, is the leading global software provider of user virtualization solutions that transform organizations into productive mobile workforces securely governed by IT. AppSense works with customers to reduce IT complexity and enable enterprise consumerization with independent management of the user experience across all mobile devices and desktops. User virtualization improves the deployment, management and migration of multi-platform desktop and mobile environments. The company is headquartered in New York, NY with offices around the world. For more information visit www.appsense.com. 2013, AppSense Limited. AppSense is a registered trademark of AppSense Limited in the US, UK and other countries worldwide. All rights reserved. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. The information in this document is believed to be correct at time of printing but no representation or warranty is made as to its accuracy or completeness.