Desktop Reboots Haunt IT Teams Year-Round
For as long as Windows desktops have been used in enterprises, organizations have had to delicately handle desktop reboots. Outside of the workplace, reboots are routine. Sure, they can cause frustration, but they aren’t really that big of a deal. In the corporate world, reboots are a necessity AND the bane of IT teams. While usually scheduled for out of hours, IT teams often work late nights to ensure a successful deployment has been completed. In 24-hour workplaces, such as hospitals, there is never a good time for scheduled reboots, but there’s no way to fully eliminate them.
Discover how application containers can alleviate install-related desktop reboots in Rory Monaghan’s latest Office of the Technologist address:
Application Installs Derail Employee Productivity
Virtualizing your applications eliminates the need for traditional application installs and the need for install-related reboots. By achieving full virtualization coverage, you can get to a single desktop image and effectively reduce the number of reboots required for your desktops to once a month to accommodate standard Windows Updates.
Moving to virtualization and dynamically delivering applications can also make rolling back a bad update for an application that was not thoroughly tested during UAT a simple and quick process. If user’s login to a work device or personal device at the beginning of the workday and an application update is available as a container rather than a traditional application package that update can be delivered in seconds rather than minutes and of course will not require a reboot which improves the overall employee experience.
Modernizing IT’s Approach to Application Updates Could Save Lives
A former healthcare CIO I worked under once told us an unexpected desktop reboot can be a life-threatening event. Unfortunately, I did experience an unexpected yet mandatory reboot in the middle of clinical staff’s morning rounds. In the morning, there was a successful application update installed for an application that is used company wide. However, it turned out user acceptance testing missed a critical issue, yielding a 7 am flood of support tickets reporting a critical workflow was broken. We had to push a fix ASAP, but it was now time for clinical staff’s morning rounds.
While we sent out warnings of the upcoming reboot to help them plan for disruption, most clinical staff did not see the notice and the reboot fully disrupted their rounds.
Had we virtualized our application estate, we could have dynamically rolled back the faulty application update without requiring reboots – mitigating potentially life-threatening downtime.
Another scenario where a former organization of mine could have greatly benefited from application virtualization – specifically application containers – was an environment for a large financial institution. An application update was requested to take place at 1pm – though it should have been 1am. Unfortunately, the administrator who scheduled the deployment did not question the request. The person who requested the deployment meant to put 1 am on the request form, resulting in an application update that required 2 reboots hitting machines on a trading room floor in the middle of the afternoon, leading to a downtime of over 30 minutes. Had we implemented application virtualization, we could have dynamically provisioned the update without requiring any installations – mitigating end user downtime and saving the organization millions of dollars.
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