Desktop to Cloud. Browser Migration in the Enterprise. Written By Quest Software, Inc.

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Browser Migration in the Enterprise

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Abstract

Business is in the cloud, not at the desk. Instead of accessing information in the office, we now need real-time answers from our business applications in any place, at any time—which means relying more and more on browser-based access.

In this world of instant access, the enterprise must be ready to take applications designed for the old desktop and make them work on a web-based platform. This white paper examines the impact of migrating an enterprise's websites, web-based applications and intranets to a cloud platform through a modern browser such as Internet Explorer 9 (IE9).

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Introduction

The world is no longer what it used to be.

Think back 10, perhaps 15 years, and the corporate environment was very different. The desktop stayed at one physical place and hosted natively installed applications, used locally. Move forward a few years and the laptop started to appear; in some places, there was even a deployment of server-based computing. These develop-ments started to provide mobility for the user. Now, with the addition of ubiquitous internet access, we’re able to access the corporate environment from any place at any time.

Today, our way of working is vastly different from what it used to be. As individuals, our lives, both professional and personal, are a mass of applications. We expect information to be at our fingertips; anything less than a real-time return on our queries is fast becoming unacceptable. Organizations are looking to access their applications through a web interface or browser; they may even use a cloud-based service such as Salesforce.com. Many want to virtualize some of their applications in order to provide the desired instantaneous access.

What does this all mean for the enterprise? Ultimately, that there is a deepening reliance on browser-based access to the corporate application estate. Enabling this browser-based world brings unique challenges never before encountered by the enterprise. This white paper examines the primary factors that organizations need to consider when migrating to a new browser and how those hurdles can be overcome. This will be discussed with specific reference to the latest browser version from Microsoft, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), along with the benefits of deploying this new browser into the enterprise.

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The Growth of Cloud Computing

In September 2011, the analyst firm Global Industry Analysts released its view on the world of cloud computing.1 They stated that even with a global recession in hand, the world of cloud computing (that is to say, everything driven by a browser) had “marched steadily upward and forward.” In fact, the analyst firm estimates that the cloud computing services market will be worth $222.5 billion by 2015, with the key business drivers being the cost effectiveness of the services, the minimal to zero investment required, and the low level of management needed to maintain these solutions.

In the same month, the TechAisle Report announced the growth of cloud-based services being used by small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).2Cloud-based services are defined as any service or application delivered to the user through a browser. It was estimated that by the end of 2011, over 138 million SMBs worldwide would be using cloud services and applications to carry out their business. It was also estimated that spending by SMBs on this activity was $11 billion and that this would continue growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12% over the next four years.

Quest’s ChangeBASE team corroborates these findings in its extensive work with Fortune 1000 and FSTE 500 organizations: it finds that up to two web-based applications exist in the corporate environment for every one natively installed application. In a very short time, the vast majority of enterprise applications deployed to the user will be web-based.

The recent launch of Microsoft’s latest browser version, Internet Explorer 9, is important to this growth in cloud computing. In the August 2011 NetApp browser market share report, Roger Capriotti, Director of Internet Explorer marketing at Microsoft, stated that IE9 accounted for 20.4% of all browser use globally, and that 27.7% of Windows 7 licenses in the US were being deployed with IE9 as the default browser.3

The rest of this white paper explores the challenges and opportunities these developments bring to enterprises today.

1_{Patricia Brown, ”Cloud Growth Prompts Dramatic Shift in Enterprise Security Strategies.”}

http://www.cio.com/article/688302/Cloud_Growth_Prompts_Dramatic_Shift_in_Enterprise_Security_Strategies. 2_{“Worldwide SMB Cloud Computing Spend Estimated to be US$11 Billion in 2011 with 138 Million SMB Users} on Cloud.” http://www.techaisle.com/prsmbwwcloudspend.html

3_{Marius Oiaga, “1 in 5 Windows Users Worldwide are running IE9.”} http://news.softpedia.com/news/1-in-5-Windows-7-Users-Worldwide-Are-Running-IE9-219706.shtml.

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The Challenges

Given that the growth of web-based applications and services is expected to rise dramatically over the next four years, businesses can expect challenges in embracing this technology. For example, how will this affect the migration plans of an organization moving from Windows XP to Windows 7? Windows 7 is the first operating system deployed with a pre-installed browser. This means that a migration from XP to Windows 7 is more than just an operating system move; it is also inherently a browser upgrade to IE8 or later. And moving from IE6 to IE8 or IE9 poses important challenges.

In fact, Chris Jackson, Microsoft’s principal application compatibility expert, recently said that IE6 was the "number one blocker of Windows 7 deployments that we have right now."4Jackson explained that while organiza-tions want to migrate to Windows 7, they are finding that key web-based applicaorganiza-tions within their environments are not compatible with Microsoft IE8 or IE9. This is the first time any organization has had to address such a challenge as part of the initial operating system migration project.

To aid organizations in overcoming this new challenge, Quest has identified several major hurdles for organiza-tions to consider as they move to a predominantly web-based environment:

• What challenges must be overcome in order to successfully migrate web-based applications?

• How do you take an application designed for yesterday’s desktop environment and make it work on tomor-row’s platform?

• What is the impact of migrating your current websites, browsers and intranets to IE9?

• What does the growth of social networking mean to organizations? The sections below discuss each challenge in turn.

Challenges in Migrating Web-based Applications

Challenges to successfully migrating web-based applications fall into two groups: the “internal” challenge of what goes on within the company, and the “external” challenge of the user experience of the web application.

Internal Challenges

Having Many Web Applications and Browser Versions

Do you know how many web applications and browser versions and editions you have in your environment? A leading global telecommunications company upgrading to Windows 7 recently found that it had over 20 different IE6 browser configurations and over 1,200 web-based applications. Even basic manual testing would have required 3000 person-days at a cost of €500 per day, for a total of €1.5 million. In addition, the company required role-based testing: anyone using the application had to work through it to fully test compatibility. For some applications, the company estimated 20-30 different people would be required to manually test each application. Not surprisingly, the organization found this approach to testing untenable.

Of course, the challenge goes beyond assessing the compatibility of each application with IE9; organizations must also determine what to do with business-critical applications that are found to be incompatible. The more applications you have, the more likely you are to find yourself faced with this issue.

4_{James Hutchinson, “Internet Explorer 6 is the Biggest Block to Windows 7.”}

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Locating the Original Code

Businesses change; mergers and acquisitions happen; and people move within organizations and leave them. Given this, trying to find the original code of an in-house web application can be difficult, if not impossible. But without access to the original code, compatibility testing is extremely difficult. The required complex testing environment is a drain on internal resource; the testing is time-consuming; and the appropriate knowledge and skills may not be available within the business. And even if testing is performed, an organization of any size may not have the skills internally to fix the problems that compatibility testing brings to the fore.

Handling Applications Built on Older Browser Versions

Organizations migrating to the latest browser version often find that their intranets, websites, customer and company information, and web-based applications are built on IE6. The significant evolution in Internet Explorer builds between IE6 and later versions means that almost all such web applications will experience some form of compatibility issue when migrated to Internet Explorer 8. This challenge is always greatest for organizations when they have purchased applications in question from third parties because persuading vendors to test their applications for compatibility can be very difficult. To overcome this challenge, organizations will need to test the applications internally and then report back to the vendors, outlining in detail where incompatibilities lie. This will assist the vendors in effectively making the fixes while ensuring the organizations can confidently receive the new versions.

External Challenges

Ensuring Compatibility for External Users

Any organization with externally facing web-based applications must be concerned not only with employees, but also with their external users. External users seek to access web-based applications from multiple entry points; they have different settings and configurations on their devices; and they use different browser versions. Here the compatibility challenge is to ensure that your web-based application behaves and looks exactly the same, regardless of the configuration of the user environment. To achieve this uniformity of experience, all presentation and operational compatibility issues need to be identified and fixed. This again is an onerous task for an in-house packaging team, who may only have experience of dealing with native application compatibility issues.

Making Yesterday’s Desktop Applications Work on Tomorrow’s Platform

Although organizations are relying more and more on web applications, many business-critical applications are still natively installed and have been designed to work solely on the desktop. Many organizations want to be able to access these favored and trusted business process applications from the cloud through their preferred corporate browser.

One path to achieving this goal is virtualization. The challenge, however, is determining whether the native application can be virtualized, and at what cost. Questions to ask include the following:

• Can this application be virtualized, and which virtual platform is it best suited to?

• If the application can be virtualized, what compatibility issues are there, and can they be fixed?

• If the compatibility issues can be fixed, what is the true cost involved? Is this move really a good investment for the business?

• If the application can and should be virtualized, what processes are required to get the application ready for the cloud?

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There is an additional factor to consider when making a native application cloud ready. Some applications cannot be virtualized and some applications will work better on one virtualization platform than another. In these cases, organizations can take a hybrid approach to virtualization, using several variants of application virtualization but maintaining a single corporate browser from which to access them.

Automated application compatibility testing will rapidly identify which native applications are ripe for virtualization. Quest ChangeBASE can help your organization not only tell which virtual platform is best suited to the application estate, but also discover any IE9 compatibility issues.

Benefits of Migrating to Internet Explorer 9

Organizations that move their application estates into the cloud enjoy vastly reduced costs, including minimal resource and management overheads; business efficiency; and ubiquitous access to information and applica-tions. To facilitate this move, migration to Windows 7, IE9 and virtualization will quickly become the norm. There are many benefits to migrating to IE9, especially its enhanced performance and functionality. Microsoft has taken the stance of future-proofing this version of Internet Explorer; IE9 has been developed for the enterprise with the objective of being capable of addressing the browser requirements of the rapidly moving organization for the next three to five years. New functionality, such as HTML5 compatibility, means that the enterprise will have minimal work to do to maintain the browser for the foreseeable future.

Social Networking

The increase in the number of social applications regularly accessed in the corporate environment should also be considered. Web-based applications, services and platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Eloqua and Netsuite are merging the social and professional workplace. Industry commentators have linked this to the increasing variety of devices in use.5 No longer is the user limited to a single device; several mobile devices are the norm. IDC’s five-year mobile enterprise device usage forecast stated that worldwide shipments of corporate mobile devices would have a CAGR of 54%, with more than 82 million units being shipped this year.6 However, many would argue that the increase of social applications is driving the convergence of devices within the enterprise. IDC’s research also found that 70% of converged mobile device users use their single device for business and personal communications, and that 52% of all 18-24 year-olds have “always on” access to their social networking site of choice, including during the workday.7

What does this mean for organizations? They should view this new way of working as a business enabler, and understand that since users will continually aspire to working with the latest technology, the business case for migrating to IE9 has never been more compelling.

5_{Stan Gibson, “Personal Devices Create a Dilemma for Corporate IT.” eweek.com, January 2008,} http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Personal-Devices-Create-a-Dilemma-for-Corporate-IT/. 6_Ibid.

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Overcoming the Hurdles of Browser

Migration

Quest’s ChangeBASE team has been heavily involved in the world of native application compatibility for nearly five years, and Quest ChangeBASE Browser Compatibility, its award-winning browser and web application compatibility testing tool,8 has enabled over 20% of the Fortune 100 and FTSE 500 to successfully migrate to Windows 7, Office 2010, and IE8 and 9, and to embrace application virtualization.

In fact, ChangeBASE Browser Compatibility is now the tool of choice for organizations looking to migrate their browser and web application portfolio. The extensive testing and granular reporting provided by ChangeBASE Browser Compatibility enable organizations to see where compatibility issues lie; make proactive and speedy decisions regarding their web applications and browsers; and ultimately save money, resource and time in their migration processes.

You can simply drag and drop source code files and URLs onto the ChangeBASE Workbench and run compati-bility checks in a matter of minutes. However, the real differentiator for ChangeBASE Browser Compaticompati-bility is its agentless functionality to capture real-time user activity, called Client Side Capture (CSC). CSC collates all the information performed at the desktop for the web application or website, such as portal login. The data can then be loaded into ChangeBASE Browser Compatibility and tested for compatibility as easily as URLs or source code files. This is of great benefit to organizations that need an approach whereby real users can work as normal while the migration team captures all the data they need from the live environment.

As we have seen, organizations should also consider virtualization in parallel with the wider Windows 7 and browser project. Quest ChangeBASE Professional automatically assesses and fixes native applications for compatibility with multiple virtual technologies, a key differentiator between Quest ChangeBASE and other solutions on the market. It also enables organizations to automatically convert native applications into target virtual formats. This enables organizations to deploy the most effective virtualization technology for their estate with minimal risk and resources.

8

Quest ChangeBASE Browser Compatibility (formerly known as AOK Browse-It) won the Techworld Award for Enterprise Application of the Year 2011. See “Techworld Awards: 2011 Winners”:

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Summary

The world has changed: browser-based access to web applications, platforms and services is now de rigueur for the corporate enterprise, and social and professional life are merging. Organizations are being driven to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 and 9 when they choose to adopt Windows 7, the first operating system to have a browser embedded within it.

This white paper identified key hurdles organizations must overcome in order to achieve a successful browser upgrade, including the following:

• Establishing the number of web-based applications in the environment

• Determining the organization’s ability to source the original code for web applications developed in-house

• Understanding which browser or platform each application was built on

• Ensuring that the application behaves the same when external users access it from multiple entry points and with different browsers, settings and configurations

• Assessing which applications can be virtualized and at what cost

Quest ChangeBASE solutions can help with these challenges and ensure a successful browser migration. The world is indeed changing and, with Quest ChangeBASE, organizations are changing with it.

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About Quest Software, Inc.

Quest Software (Nasdaq: QSFT) simplifies and reduces the cost of managing IT for more than 100,000 customers worldwide. Our innovative solutions make solving the toughest IT management problems easier, enabling customers to save time and money across physical, virtual and cloud environments. For more information about Quest solutions for administration and automation, data protection, development and optimization, identity and access management, migration and consolidation, and performance monitoring, go to www.quest.com.

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