Access IT Automation Blog

If the last two years have taught us anything about the importance of impactful IT investments, it is that creating an outstanding employee experience is just as important as optimizing customer experiences. While at first, organizations tried to create outstanding digital experiences to retain their customers (and sometimes even lure new ones from less agile competitors), it became very quickly apparent that employees working from home required a better set-up as well. 

Traditionally, application packaging and testing solutions required an organization to work its application management workflows around the platform's requirements. And for some organizations that have what I call a sausage-factory-type process — meaning feed the to-be-packaged and tested applications in at the front, go through a pretty linear workflow, and receive the desired outcome at the end — this works pretty well. 

Over the past few years, Access IT Automation has grown from being a provider of application packaging and testing automation solutions (Access Capture) and automated endpoint management tools (such as Access Symphony and Access FixEngine) to creating a holistic platform that allows enterprise-size organizations to not only enable Modern Desktops, but to also constantly fine-tune their environment to walk the fine line between optimizing for user performance/experience and keeping costs as low as possible. We call this balancing act Modern Workplace Experience.

While the vast majority of large organizations are still in the trenches with Windows 10 Servicing updates and only starting to evaluate Windows 11 for a migration project later this year or (more likely) early next year, there are a few major pitfalls you can get trapped in early on that heavily impact the success of your project down the road.

When companies are considering moving to a VDI framework, they'll have to think about whether to utilize stateful or stateless VDI designs. Companies can get massive efficiencies by moving machines to VDI. Sometimes this is done in conjunction with moving to a new operating system, or in the context of other legacy migration projects. However, in the process of planning, the company will have to figure out whether it's best to incorporate a stateful or “persistent” model, or a stateless or “non-persistent” one. 

Remember that time Microsoft told us Windows 10 was going to be the last Windows ever? It was a claim that was more than a bit over-hyped, but the reality today is that you probably have thousands of machines in your organization running a version of Windows 10 that isn't going to be supported in a few years’ time. That puts upgrading to Windows 11 very much in the frame.

Transforming all or most of your IT environment from a traditional setup to a modern desktop is something we have been talking about for a long time now. Looking at our past posts, you can see the advantages of being on a modern desktop, and we believe this is where enterprises that move the fastest and adopt it quickly will have the best competitive advantage. However, embracing the modern desktop comes with a set of challenges, and today we will discuss five key ones.

I am sure your inbox has been flooded with end-of-year recap and/or look-ahead-in-2022 posts in the last month, so I hope this finds its way to the top of your inbox. Like 2020, 2021 was a year that did not go as originally planned, as the world was still dealing with the pandemic. However, the changes and challenges did not weaken our resolve. One of the primary goals of our company is (and always has been) to make businesses run more smoothly and efficiently by using automation to reduce mundane, repetitive IT tasks. To meet this goal, we are always adapting our offerings to suit the needs of our clients.

If there has been one common struggle over the last few years for CIOs and CTOs, it has been the constant need to do more — from OS migrations and SaaS implementations to the management of ever-increasing cybersecurity threats — and to accomplish these tasks with either stagnant or reduced resources, including budget and qualified staffing. Then when the pandemic and work-at-home orders hit, many enterprises pivoted, shifting their priorities and putting projects on hold while focusing on taking care of immediate needs until they could go back to "normal". With it now being almost two years into the "new normal", and with the constant changing of regulations for essential and non-essential businesses, the priorities for 2022 and beyond are more important than ever before.

We recently discussed what Modern Desktop Enablement is. We touched on the subject of why it is now more important than ever to enable and manage Modern Desktop in your organization, but today, we take a closer look at how this will be influenced by and have an impact on IT spending, remote work environments, and cyber security.