In case you missed it, we featured the first five tips of this series here.

But to Recap…

  • 37% of IT organizations across the public and private sectors plan to fully migrate to Windows 10 within the next year
  • 35% plan to migrate within the next two years
  • 14% have not yet established a migration timeline

Ivanti’s first five tips to help you gain insight into completing your Windows 10 OS migration process:

Tip #1: Prepare for a New Release Cadence

Tip #2: Don’t Let Applications Be a Barrier to Migration

Tip #3: Pick an OS Deployment Strategy

Tip #4: Ensure Windows and Applications are Properly Patched

Tip #5: Stop Malicious or Unlicensed Applications

Tip #6: MANAGE USER ADMIN PRIVILEGES

By now, federal agency IT organizations understand that providing users with full administrative rights makes endpoints vulnerable to attack, significantly increasing security and manageability expenses, while also reducing regulatory, legal and liability controls.

Out of 20 items on its list of Critical Security Controls, the Center for Internet Security ranks ‘controlled use of administrative privileges’ at number 5. But how can trusted agency IT administrators help maintain user productivity without giving users the keys to the kingdom? By applying granular privilege management techniques, administrators can remove full admin rights from users, quickly and easily, instead providing them with ‘elevated’ privileges to access only the apps or tasks that these users most need. This also helps to simplify endpoint security, reducing support calls, and lowering costs.

Tip #7: PLAN FOR A HYBRID ENVIRONMENT

Complexity is a nagging challenge in federal IT environments, and hybrid computing environments, while popular, certainly don’t reduce IT complexity concerns. Increasingly, agency success has little to do with the technologies used, and more to do with how well each agency can bring disparate technologies together in a way that’s efficient for all types of users.

This creates a new challenge for IT in terms of predicting and reacting to context. Windows 10 is accessible from an array of devices, including PCs, laptops, tablets, handheld smartphones, and even wearable devices. Users today log onto their workspaces from nearly any location, using different types of endpoints. And IT administrators must understand the context in which users are logging on, to adapt each user’s workspace experience accordingly, to help those users be productive from any location.

For example, a user in an Internet café will typically require a much higher level of security protection to access government resources, especially compared to an employee working from the secure confines of a federal agency office. It’s crucial to utilize information about user context, such as location, device or connection type, even time of day, to determine resource entitlement. This will help you properly secure and protect Windows 10 endpoints.

Tip #8: CREATE AN *ULTIMATE* USER EXPERIENCE

User acceptance of a new workspace starts at logon. If the first logon process is slow, user acceptance of a new workspace will be less-than-stellar from day one. And, with every slow log on and every slow-running, frozen, or unavailable application, user acceptance — and productivity — will diminish.

To optimize usability and user acceptance of Windows 10, Ivanti recommends running analytics to evaluate user experiences using the new workspace. You should baseline existing environments and record metrics such as logon times, memory and CPU utilization, application usage, and privileges needed to run resources.

It’s also a good idea to ascertain how and where users are storing their data — which is crucial to ensure a good user experience, both during and after OS migration. This exercise will allow you to pre-empt potential bottlenecks, or resource hogs that could affect quality of service in your new environment. It will also help you understand license requirements and identify users with unnecessary or other less than secure rights/privileges.

Tip #9: GIVE USERS EASY ACCESS TO THEIR DATA

One of the biggest obstacles in migrating to Windows 10 involves how to migrate files and folders stored locally on each user’s prior device. In this situation, how does IT ensure both agency and personal files are securely backed up, so they can be effortlessly migrated to new devices? It’s also difficult for IT administrators to establish how many local files exist on each device, to determine the best way to migrate them to Windows 10.

Storing user files and folders on file shares or home PC drives in the data center is another challenge for agency IT organizations and users, because users working remotely or offline may not be able to access their files stored in the data center. If they have remote access to on-premises file shares, use of a VPN is typically required. This can frustrate users and adds another layer of security and complexity that causes headaches for IT administrators when dealing with break/fix, migration, and upgrade scenarios.

Ivanti® File Director enables effortless migration of user data, no matter where it resides. With File Director, user file and folder migration becomes a simple, stress-free task that, once initiated, prepares agency IT organizations instantly for any future migration projects. In addition, the data migration process is 100% unobtrusive to users.

Tip #10: PERSONALIZE USER WORKSPACES

In a recent Dimensional Research survey, over 90% of users surveyed expressed emotions ranging from annoyance to despair when asked for their reactions to changes on their desktop. The survey also revealed 32% of users are already confused by the Windows 10 interface.

If, after migration to Windows 10, a user’s personal settings are missing, it’s inevitable that user acceptance of the newly delivered Windows 10 workspace will be negatively affected. To avoid this scenario, federal agencies may choose to continue to support users on older operating systems and hardware.

However, if some users also need new hardware that runs Windows 10, new headaches arise because Windows 10 introduces an additional roaming profile architecture that makes it difficult to persist/maintain prior user settings when users switch between different devices and platforms.

However, if a user logs onto their new Windows 10 workspace and finds their familiar settings already in place, agency IT administrators will reduce fears and increase user acceptance, speeding the transition away from older Windows versions. To enable the ability to maintain user settings postmigration, you’ll need to capture and manage user personalization information, independently from the underlying operating system and applications. This will ensure personal settings are always available, regardless of the device or platform used.

Check out the first five tips in the full report here. Start your transition now with Ivanti!