Is your migration plan a house of cards?

Remember your last company-wide Windows migration?

Chances are, it was a 100% IT-driven effort that was planned out with military-like precision over the course of weeks or months. Every factor was considered. Every hurdle evaluated. All of it done to minimize the disruption on your users and get the project completed as quickly as possible (even though it never seemed to work out that way).

Planning on using the same approach for your Windows 10 migration? Well, you can forget about it. That’s because Microsoft’s new as-a-service model for Windows 10 has caused the traditional migration process to come tumbling down.

Previously, you went several years between major releases and 5 to 10 years before end-of-life, so IT could spend ample time preparing and executing the complex, labor-intensive migration process. Now, major updates are planned for twice yearly, with only 18 months until service and support expires. And it’s your various users, who are impatient to access key business apps on their personally-owned devices, that are driving the momentum for their organizations to update to Windows 10.

Now, the burden is on you and your IT team to make it happen—quickly!

So, what’s the best way to get the process going? Start by asking a few, simple questions.

Take a good, hard look at your organization’s work flow and business processes. Think about how your business has changed now that many employees are accessing—or needing to access—business-critical apps and data from any location and on a range of devices. Will the migration process cause major business disruptions? Are your core business apps compatible with Windows 10? Those are the types of considerations that might cause your upcoming migration to crash like the aforementioned house of cards.

See where you stand. Download our Windows 10 Migration Checklist now and see if your IT organization has what it takes to make the move to the new OS.

Cornerstone.IT