Access IT Automation Blog

The technology industry is notorious for its love of acronyms, particularly when it comes to cloud computing. With cloud-based solutions becoming increasingly essential for every company and industry worldwide, three key cloud service models have emerged as the backbone of the cloud revolution: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The phrase "as-a-Service" refers to a wide variety of technology services delivered to companies or individuals via the internet by a third-party service provider. 

According to a recent McKinsey study, 94% of the UK workforce lack the skills that will be required in 2030: "Without concerted action by employers, two-thirds of the UK workforce could lack basic digital skills by 2030, while more than 10 million people could be under-skilled in leadership, communication, and decision-making,” the report said.

This alone is a drastic issue to deal with — which only is made worse by new, additional challenges the country is facing: the wide-reaching effects on the general workforce and IT environments created by COVID and by the exit from the European Union at the end of the year (BREXIT), and new labour laws like IR35 which further narrows access to available resources. Let's have a closer look at the situation before we talk about some ways you can start to mitigate the associated risks. 

In my 30+ years of experience in technology, I have migrated Windows 95 to XP, Windows NT to Windows 7, and now Windows 7 to Windows 10. And they all had one thing in common: I had to come in and rescue the migration projects many times because, initially, in peoples’ heads — even if they are technologists — OS migrations are simply thought of as clicking "Next" a few times. 

However, the opposite is true. In my opinion, upgrading to a new operating system in a large organization is one of the most difficult projects you can undertake. It touches every single person, application, and technology in the organization. You have to be extremely methodical and prepared in everything you do to finish the project successfully. Otherwise, your timeline, budget, and everything very quickly get away from you.

2020 has been a crazy year — there is no question about that. Suddenly having to switch to all of your employees working from home sent the vast majority of organizations scrambling, causing utter chaos. In fact, "companies spent an additional $15 billion a week on technology during the first wave of the pandemic, to ensure that employees could work from home safely," according to TechRepublic.

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.

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.

The term "Evergreen IT" has been around for some years. It has been defined multiple times in many different ways, but when talking to enterprise IT organizations around the world, more often than not, IT managers and executives complain that they still don't really understand what it means.

Today, I want to kick off a small series of blog articles that tackles the basics of Evergreen IT by defining the term in the simplest way possible (and in less than 100 words!) before taking it apart and going through the details.