Take the Fear Out of Change: What Windows 10 Migration Questions Must You Answer?

General support and updates for Windows 7 will end as of January 14, 2020, which means security updates end after this date, as well, opening your organisation up to potential vulnerabilities. This represents a great opportunity to simplify your workstation estate, rid your organisation of some of the technical debt accrued over the years and use the improved native security stack made available by Microsoft in Windows 10, including such features as antivirus, host-based IPS, data-loss prevention, code-signing and OS/Hardware security integration.

Windows 10 migrations are among the (many) projects that have the potential to cause sleepless nights for IT practitioners, architects and project managers alike. They’re not without complexity or risk, and sometimes a typical response is to engage third-party professional services to help, making this kind of pervasive organisational change that much more onerous. It is also tempting to delay migration until endpoints can be replaced through attrition, but that is a risky strategy considering the security implications of not patching and the challenges of managing heterogeneous environments at scale.

As my colleague Josh Schofield examined a few weeks ago, whenever we think about a Windows 10 migration we can broadly delineate the project into three key areas of focus:

• Preparing endpoints for the upgrade
• Assessing endpoints for applicability and compatibility
• Performing the upgrade

Windows 10 migration made easy

Before we even think about the second and third stages, there is crucial information we need that will help us understand what needs to be done in the first stage. To solve the challenge of assessing compatibility, at a minimum we need to be able to answer the following questions:

• How can we obtain a detailed understanding of the specifics of every single Windows machine on our network?
• Are we sure that we are aware of all of them? (There is definitely no unmanaged Windows XP floating around, right?)
• Do all the systems support UEFI? With what capabilities?
• How about TPM? Is it present, and what version?
• Is there a clear and up-to-date understanding of CPU, RAM and details of disk size, free space and wasted space?
• Can we use this as a mechanism to understand what is actually being used, as opposed to simply discovering software that is installed? Can we standardise and de-duplicate the software in use across our organisation?
• How quickly and accurately are we able to determine all of the above information?

Join us to learn how Tanium’s speed, scale and simplicity can facilitate and super-charge your Windows 10 migration projects with our modern approach. We have two sessions for our upcoming webinar, with details below.

Details:

• Session 1: Wednesday, June 19 at 10:00 am PT/1:00 pm ET/6:00 pm BST / 7:00 pm CST
• Session 2: Friday, June 28 at 8:30 am PT/11:30 am ET/4:30 pm BST / 5:30 pm CST

For more, have a look at our Tanium Community articles and accompanying video series on using Tanium Deploy to execute Windows 10 migration.

Interested in seeing Tanium in action? Schedule a one-to-one demo or attend our weekly webinar. Talk to our Tanium experts at our upcoming events.