Slashing costs through deployment of Vista
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In an age of straitened economic circumstances, why on earth would IT departments roll out a new operating system? Stephen Pritchard argues that rock-solid cost savings and a best-of-breed security present a good case.
The ability to turn off a PC automatically might not seem much of a justification for a major operating system upgrade. But if the technology saves around £50 per user, per year – and your organisation has a large number of computers – then the result can be very attractive.
The London Borough of Newham, for example, has some 6,000 employees and 5,000 desktop PCs. The local authority has started to upgrade its computers to Windows Vista in several areas – such as to support flexible working, and where PCs are provided to the public, for example in libraries.
According to Newham’s CIO, Geoff Connell, energy saving (both in financial and environmental cost), came second in priority only to being on the latest stable release of their main operating system when the decision came to deploy Vista. “Cost savings of approximately £50 per PC per year makes for a big number when you multiply it by 5,000,” he says.
Energy savings represent just some of the benefits that come from moving to Windows Vista. As well as the power-saving technologies, Vista offers improved security – not least through BitLocker technology, which provides for in-built data encryption – and better device management. Then there is the issue of moving to a more advanced, and more future-proof, technology platform.
These benefits, perhaps more than an updated user interface or better graphics performance, make Vista a worthwhile investment for public-sector organisations.
“The general perception around Vista is sometimes that people are comfortable using Windows XP,” says Mike Haigh, Government Strategic Marketing Manager at Microsoft. Moving to Vista will, though, bring significant improvements for almost all users. Although the user interface improvements in the operating system might be seen as geared more towards consumers, professional users will benefit from tighter integration between Vista and the latest release of Microsoft Office, and improved features around desktop search and document management. “There has been quite a lot of work done on how information is presented,” says Haigh. “Vista tied to Office and an effective server regime is a force to be reckoned with, putting real-time information securely at everyone’s fingertips”.
Better security, at lower cost
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When it comes to security, Windows Vista is widely seen as the most secure version of Windows – ever. The operating system has been redesigned from the ground up, with security in mind. This shows itself in practical ways, such as BitLocker and the ability to selectively disable USB ports, as well as in a more robust code base that is more resistant to hacking than any major alternative operating system.
As a result, the CESG has rated Windows Vista as suitable for handling government information up to impact level three (IL3), which makes the OS suitable for use in around 80 per cent of government applications without further augmentation. As well as providing greater assurance to CIOs and to government departments’ customers, this brings an immediate cost saving benefit, by removing the need to buy and install many third-party security and encryption utilities.
Improved management means lower IT costs
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For IT departments, none of this is likely to create a business case for upgrading, if the new software is expensive to deploy or difficult to manage.
Vista, however, is designed to be easy to roll out without the need for time-consuming processes or expensive additional resources.
Tight integration with System Center management tools, and the fact that both Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 come with standard builds that can be deployed centrally make the operating system far less resource-intensive to install or manage than previous releases.
In fact, organisations rolling out Vista should see a rapid reduction in overheads for running their PC estates; and measures such as the ability to run both older operating systems, through Virtual PC 2007, through to full-scale virtualised environments such as Microsoft Application Virtualisation (an add-on to Vista available to Software Assurance customers), many of the hurdles to deploying a new operating system have been dealt with up front with Vista.
Stay ahead of the game
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Perhaps the most compelling reason of all for moving to Vista, though, is the opportunity to move to a new technology platform.
Some of the early reservations around moving to Vista centred around support for applications, and in particular device drivers. But these issues have largely been addressed now by the third-party software community, so compatibility is not the barrier it once was.
In fact, organisations upgrading to Vista now will be taking a significant step to ensuring compatibility with future releases of the operating system. Windows 7 – the next planned release of the OS – will be based largely on the same technical foundations as Windows Vista.
Not only will this mean an easier transition for most users from Windows Vista to Windows 7, but it also means that organisations considering moving from XP or other versions of Windows directly to Windows 7 would still face significant technology changes at that point. Holding back just means missing economy and productivity benefits today.
Given that some tasks, such as regression testing for heavily customised or bespoke applications are likely to take time, there are strong arguments in favour of moving to Vista now, and starting that process. In the meantime, organisations can lock in many of the productivity and management benefits immediately.
“Organisations looking to save money on their IT should move to Vista now, to take advantage of what it offers. That especially applies to organisations with Software Assurance,” says Microsoft’s Haigh. “The move from Windows XP to Vista will be more significant, in terms of technology, than the move will be from Windows Vista to Windows 7.”
Stephen Pritchard is a journalist of many years standing specialising in business and technology. He writes regularly for the Financial Times, The Independent, Information Age and Red Herring.