KEY TOPICS

Keeping The Lights On

Refresh Cycles

Time & Effort

Minimum System Requirements

Information Security

Disaster Recovery 

KEEPING THE LIGHTS ON

On average, organisations in the UK spend £3,000 per year providing, configuring and supporting each desktop PC or laptop they own. Source: National Computer Centre.

Security updates, software patches and application upgrades all take time, and the more devices you have to manage the more time and effort you need to consume, just to "keep the lights on".

And by "keep the lights on" we mean, keep the computer doing exactly the same as it did the day before.

All of this time and effort provides no actual benefit to the business, it is just house-keeping and maintenance.

Server Based Computing and Virtual Desktops allow organisations to patch hundreds of desktops at once centrally, reducing this wasted time and effort to a bare minimum.

REFRESH CYCLES

It was not uncommon only a few years ago to replace every computer or laptop every 3 years.

This normally happened because organisations would often amortise or "write-off" the cost of computer equipment over 3 years.

Once the 3 years were up, and new computer or laptop could be bought and the process started again.

In the current financial climate these desktop refresh cycles are often extended to 4 or 5 year interval in order to keep costs down.

Server Based Computing and Virtual Desktops can extend this cycle even further and offer another 5 to 10 years of useful working life to the equipment you already own.

This could save most organisations between £400 and £600 per PC, just in purchase costs alone.

TIME AND EFFORT

It should not be underestimated how much time and effort is required to test and deploy a new operating system on hardware it was not designed to run on.

In the past, IT departments would simply buy a new computer with the new operating system already installed.

Now that budget reductions and spending reviews are happening, the rip-and-replace mentality of old is no longer acceptable to most businesses, and new ways need to be found to keep computers running the right mix of software, at a price the business is willing to pay.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Windows XP

Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)

At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)

At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk

Windows Vista and Windows 7

1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor

1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Although no sensible IT department would ever try and run computers on bare minimum requirements, what the official specifications reveal is that the requirements have increased to between 4 and 10 times what they were previously.

For most companies, this means having to scrap old computers, and buy new ones if the "software upgrade" is not to become a "performance downgrade".

INFORMATION SECURITY

How do you get back information that has been stolen or published without your consent?

The recent wikileaks exposure show how easily a quarter of a million documents could be stolen and published without the Pentagon noticing until after the announcements were made.

Most criminals or disgruntled employees would not advertise the theft of sensitive information and the first thing you would know about it would be after a serious breach had already occurred, or the information had already been disclosed (or as is increasingly common, sold to a competitor).

DISASTER RECOVERY

IT departments will often have to dedicate a significant portion of their budget to the provision of "redundant systems". In most cases "redundancy" means buy twice as much of everything that is important, just to be sure.

As the name suggests, these systems are sat idle (sometimes for years on end) just waiting for a disaster to happen. It is quite common for redundant systems to have become obsolete before they have ever been called into service.

The modern generation of Virtual Desktops, Server Based Computing and Cloud Computing allows organisations to provide Disaster Recovery without needing to pay for redundant systems.