01732 759725 44 SOFTWARE ...continued XP and early preparation will provide an understanding of what applications can’t be moved and need some form of containerisation to protect them from vulnerabilities and give them the look and feel of Windows 11. “It’s that readiness thing,” he says. Automated testing In preparing for the migration from Windows 10 to Windows 11 Camwood provides businesses and channel partners with additional capabilities that they may not get from in-house tools (SIs and MSPs that use its services to meet their customers’ needs account for about 50% of company revenues). “A lot of organisations have invested in IP asset management solutions, which should allow them to get a view on their application state and licence count for true ups and for audits and the like. We go beyond that by automating the testing of those applications against a new Target Operating Model, significantly de-risking migration. Typically, when you look at historical migration you might have a 10-20% increase in call volumes to the service desk because an application wasn’t functioning in the way a user expected it to or in the way it did previously. We can provide the tooling resource, the capability, the process, the governance advice and the automation for application testing to de-risk that project.” Carr says that while some companies might end up relying on end of life support offered by Microsoft, many of those it works with on application compatibility testing, user acceptance testing and package deploys are already starting to think about how things will work with Windows 11. Application incompatibility rife in three out of four businesses New research discovers that many businesses are unprepared for modernisation Over three quarters (77%) of organisations have at least one application that is not compatible with the latest version of Windows, reveals a new survey of UK and US CIOs commissioned by Cloudhouse, the application compatibility packaging and configuration management solutions provider. In 89% of organisations, up to 25% of all applications could be incompatible. This is potentially a problem as 32% of respondents report that 16-25% of their applications are critical to their business operations and 24% say they are either ‘not at all’ or ‘not very’ confident in their ability to fully upgrade these platforms to be 100% compatible with the latest version of the Windows operating system Half of all businesses (50%) feel that there is a significant amount of work to still be done to modernise applications for compatibility with newer Windows versions. Additionally, 25% concede that while they’ve ironed out most issues, there is still some work to be done to ensure modernisation. Only one in five (20%) currently has a comprehensive modernisation plan in place. Mat Clothier, CEO and Founder of Cloudhouse, said: “Our research has discovered that application incompatibility is, unfortunately, a common occurrence among businesses and if left unchecked can impact the platforms that are absolutely critical to operations. It’s vital for these organisations to make use of specialist tools that allow applications to be transplanted to new Windows operating systems, without losing any functionality or impact on the user experience.” More than half (55%) of organisations say they plan to increase their 2022 budget for application modernisation by more than 25%, with 17% planning to increase it by more than 50%. https://cloudhouse.com “History shows that Microsoft will offer some form of support to customers that haven’t made the move to Windows 11 by that end of life date. My view is we’ve got a nice steady long run-up to Windows 11 coming in and Windows 10 end of life support, so why not get ready for that. Rather than having to look at extended support, which might not always be possible or just not feasible, and with all the inflationary pressures and cost pressures we’re facing, managing ongoing support costs from an OPEX point of view would be a significant target for me.” He adds that with 20 years’ experience in application packaging, testing and deployment and expertise in digital acceleration and the cloud, Camwood is well placed to help develop three-year roadmaps for customers whatever their requirement. “We’ve got a new identity where we talk about digital acceleration through the lens of applications, where we look at creating value and de-risk for customers and partners through the lens of applications based on our 20 years’ heritage in understanding application modernisation, packaging, deployment, testing and lifecycle management. In digital acceleration, we also have the ability to pivot and look at things like Azure Virtual Desktop, AWS WorkSpaces, M365, application vulnerability, but recognising that our core heritage and what we’re known for is really around the application space. “Preparation, governance, control, process, all those things that seem particularly boring to people on the outside are really the way that organisations will retain control and get the greatest value from moving to Windows 11.” www.camwood.com A new culture Carr points out that gaining control over application sprawl may require a new culture of collaboration between the business and IT which in recent years has ceded some control to end users. “The IT function and the business need to work together to understand that an application is not just an IT asset, it’s a business asset that’s owned by the business in specific functions to drive value for that part of the business. Culturally, they need to work together to look at the value and say ‘why have we got eight different versions of this?’ ‘Well, I can’t remove that one because it’s critical to running my month-end process, for example, in finance.’ ‘But actually there’s a more up to date version running in finance than in other parts of the business.’ It’s more of a cultural and business change around controls, governance and process and then understanding the whole application lifecycle – introduction, testing, retirements and feature release – through a 12 to 18-month period.” Carr adds that there will be certain applications that just can’t be moved to Windows 11 or to Microsoft Azure and the cloud. Some organisations still have applications running on Windows Mat Clothier
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