Windows 11 is here. It’s glorious but hold your horses!
Windows 11 has arrived with a fresh new look, increased speed and a whole host of new and improved features. However, if your business is looking at Windows 11 and thinking, “we only just got off Windows 7”, now is the time to be thinking about the future.
You don’t need to update today of course; you officially have until the 14th of October 2025 to get your estate from Windows 10 to 11. However, as many businesses learnt the hard way with Windows 7, the migration to a new operating system is not all plain sailing.
Windows 11 brings its own complications and challenges, when it comes to application support, hardware support and the overall end user experience. All of these can be overcome but only if the business understands them and understands how to combat them.
How should you start the roll-out?
Our suggested approach is that from November 2021, a strategic steering group be created within your business to test, run, and live with Windows 11 as their primary business device. The aim of this is to begin to unpick the operating system in your business and ultimately to ensure business functionality.
We will recommend that for these users, a spare Windows 10 device is kept in your office to provide to these members of staff in the case of a failure. This will ensure your user can get back working in a short space of time, however as a business you need to start assessing and understanding the impact that Windows 11 will have on the company and then laying the foundations for migrating across to the platform with-in one year from active support (October 2022).
Why starting early is key for business continuity.
This adoption is crucial because many businesses were impacted negatively by holding onto Windows 7 for far too long past its good end of life. This was in part due to the fact the businesses had not invested the time into ensuring they understood the business change and how to successfully manage this. It is vital that this process is started early, the issues learned and how to overcome these. From this you can then develop a staged team by team plan, alongside the testing to ensure that once a satisfactory level of business support and satisfaction is reached that users begin to migrate over from Windows 10 to 11.
The Big Rollout.
We suggest completing the migration in a team by team, location by location and in a phased approach. We would suggest that any business needs to be off Windows 10, 1 year before the end of support in 2025 as you do not want to be in the same potion that many where come the end of Windows 7 support. You must remember that once this date hits any system still on this legacy operating system will be at risk from attack and will increasingly be a target for cyber criminals.
If you would like to discuss with myself or any of the Technical Architecture team at Planet IT about how you can get ready for Windows 11 you can reach us using the contact details below.
Contact me at – LinkedIn Message James Dell or Email: [email protected]
Call 01235 433900 or Email: [email protected]
