Most IT executives and IT project managers instinctively know that Evergreen IT is the only way forward for managing increasingly complex IT landscapes that change faster than ever before. And while they also know this new management approach comes with numerous benefits, they often cannot place their finger on what exactly they can expect to gain. This is not surprising, as this is a new concept without many real-world results and insights publicly available.
Almost every organization is scrambling right now to get employees set up to work from home — bringing many Windows 10 migration projects temporarily to a halt. While the current pandemic might possibly result in support deadline extensions from Microsoft down the road, it is important to be aware of an emerging problem that almost every company will encounter: what happens when your migration is over?
Many organizations who have completed their migration have encountered the very common pitfall of the chaos created when the migration project team passes the reins to the Business-as-Usual (BAU) team who is expected to proceed as always.
2020 is a critical year for enterprises. Windows 7 went end-of-life and into paid extended support in January, and Office 2010 is going end-of-life in October, with no extended support, paid or otherwise, leaving organizations with their hands full.
With getting all your users migrated as soon as possible, you really do not need anything that can cause any lagging, incompatibility, display issues, and outright frustration for your users. To help with that, I want to make you aware of several Excel issues that you can encounter whether or not you are migrating away from Office 2010, or are already on a later on-premise version. So, let's get right to it.
If I would take the conversations I have with our clients, prospects, and partners as an indication, I would say that about 90% of enterprise IT teams are interested in Evergreen IT, but maybe only about 20% of them fully grasp the concept enough to know how to practically implement it. And it is an ambiguous concept unless you take the time to research it. This is made harder by the fact that, besides very few information sources, there isn't much information out there.
Lately, there is a lot of talk about XLAs! No, not the Excel add-in but rather Experience Level Agreements between a service provider and a customer with the goal of providing the best employee experience with said provider’s services.
Traditionally, software vendors had service-level agreements, or SLAs, which described expected minimum service levels that the service provider guaranteed (e.g., minimum uptimes or time to respond/repair issues) for the price someone would pay. Until now, SLAs were seen as the crucial measurement for a successful relationship between a software vendor and an enterprise IT department.
By now, I am sure you are aware that Windows 7 has gone end-of-life, with the decade-old OS having received two "final" updates.
If you are still running Windows 7 and want to have security and critical updates that Microsoft deems necessary, you need to be signed up for paid extended support called Extended Security Updates (ESU). While ESU can give you another three years of support at price levels that are easy to budget for, there are other associated risks with staying on Windows 7.
By now, most enterprises are using some form of IT Automation to create repeatable processes that minimize or avoid human interaction with IT systems with the goal of realizing potential cost reductions, process improvements, and efficiency gains.
However, almost always, IT automation is done in bits and pieces — without a central repository or the ability to manage them. As a result, enterprises often have dozens of unused or underutilized agents which, of course, then hinders the organization in achieving their automation goals.
2020 is going to be a big year for enterprise IT teams, with Windows 7 support having ended on January 14th. Even though the expense of paid extended support can easily be budgeted for by most enterprises, there is still a ticking clock counting down to the day when paid support runs out, not to mention other serious risk factors.
Over the past years, Access Capture has helped organizations around the world package and test applications faster, safer, more accurately, and more efficiently in an enterprise environment by automating much of the labor-intensive, costly, and tedious process.
In October 2019, we released Access Capture Version 3 which included many feature and platform improvements. We were thrilled how well it was received so we cannot wait to share with you some details on our jam-packed development calendar for 2020.
Today is the day — Windows 7 is officially at the end of its life. From now on, any organization still running Windows 7 has to go on extended support, called Extended Security Updates (ESU). At this point, if your organization hasn't migrated to Windows 10, you will have no choice but to go on the first year of support.
But what are the costs and risks associated with not migrating to Windows 10, especially if you use all three years of ESU? Today, I want to delve deeper into what you are looking at in terms of financial implications, security issues you might run into, competitive disadvantages you are creating for yourself, as well as the employee and manpower side of things. But before we dive into that, let's review some quick facts about the Extended Security Updates.