Fulton Financial Corporation has a long and storied history that began in 1882 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where local merchants and farmers organized Fulton National Bank. The bank’s name was chosen to honor Lancaster County native Robert Fulton, the inventor and artist best known for designing and building the Clermont, the first successful steamboat.
In an effort to optimize the productivity of its employees and enable them to have more time to focus on their customers, Fulton sought to upgrade the thin clients for its Citrix application virtualization infrastructure, with the help of its Citrix partner and IGEL Platinum Partner, Plan B Technologies.
In selecting a desktop computing solution to support its Citrix application virtualization infrastructure, Fulton had one unique business requirement, they were looking for a solution that would mirror the experience provided by a Windows PC, without actually being a Windows PC.
During the evaluation process, Fulton looked at thin clients from IGEL and another leading manufacturer, conducting a “bake-off” of several models including the IGEL Universal Desktop (UD6). Fulton like the fact that IGEL is forward- thinking in designing its desktop computing solutions, and began its IGEL roll-out by purchasing 2,300 IGEL UD6 thin clients in 2016 for its headquarters and branch offices, and plans to complete the roll out of IGEL thin clients to the remainder of its 3,700 employees in the coming months. The bank is also leveraging the IGEL Universal Management Suite (UMS) to manage its fleet of IGEL thin clients.
Each version of Windows and Windows Server showcases new technologies. The advent of PowerShell marked a substantial step forward in managing those features. However, the built-in graphical Windows management tools have largely stagnated - the same basic Microsoft Management Console (MMC) interfaces had remained since Windows Server 2000. Microsoft tried out multiple overhauls over the years to the built-in Server Manager console but gained little traction. Until Windows Admin Center.
WHAT IS WINDOWS ADMIN CENTER?Windows Admin Center (WAC) represents a modern turn in Windows and Windows Server system management. From its home page, you establish a list of the networked Windows and Windows Server computers to manage. From there, you can connect to an individual system to control components such as hardware drivers. You can also use it to manage Windows roles, such as Hyper-V.
On the front-end, Windows Admin Center is presented through a sleek HTML 5 web interface. On the back-end, it leverages PowerShell extensively to control the systems within your network. The entire package runs on a single system, so you don’t need a complicated infrastructure to support it. In fact, you can run it locally on your Windows 10 workstation if you want. If you require more resiliency, you can run Windows Admin Center as a role on a Microsoft Failover Cluster.
WHY WOULD I USE WINDOWS ADMIN CENTER?In the modern era of Windows management, we have shifted to a greater reliance on industrial-strength tools like PowerShell and Desired State Configuration. However, we still have servers that require individualized attention and infrequently utilized resources. WAC gives you a one-stop hub for dropping in on any system at any time and work with almost any of its facets.
ABOUT THIS EBOOKThis eBook has been written by Microsoft Cloud & Datacenter Management MVP Eric Siron. Eric has worked in IT since 1998, designing, deploying, and maintaining server, desktop, network, and storage systems. He has provided all levels of support for businesses ranging from single-user through enterprises with thousands of seats. He has achieved numerous Microsoft certifications and was a Microsoft Certified Trainer for four years. Eric is also a seasoned technology blogger and has amassed a significant following through his top-class work on the Altaro Hyper-V Dojo.
Assess what you already have
If you have a business continuity plan or a disaster recovery plan in place, that’s a good place to start. This scenario may not fit the definition of disaster that you originally intended, but it can serve to help you test your plan in a more controlled fashion that can benefit both your current situation by giving you a head start, and your overall plan by revealing gaps that would be more problematic in a more urgent or catastrophic environment with less time to prepare and implement.
Does your plan include access to remote desktops in a data center or the cloud? If so, and you already have a service in place ready to transition or expand, you’re well on your way.
Read the guide to learn what it takes for IT teams to set up staff to work effectively from home with virtual desktop deployments. Learn how to get started, if you’re new to VDI or if you already have an existing remote desktop scenario but are looking for alternatives.
The future of compute is in the cloud
Flexible, efficient, and economical, the cloud is no longer a question - it's the answer.
IT professionals that once considered if or when to migrate to the cloud are now talking about how. Earlier this year, we reached out to thousands of IT professionals to learn more about how.
Private Cloud, On-Prem, Public Cloud, Hybrid, Multicloud - each of these deployment models offers unique advantages and challenges. We asked IT decision-makers how they are currently leveraging the cloud and how they plan to grow.
Survey respondents overwhelmingly believed in the importance of a hybrid or multicloud strategy, regardless of whether they had actually implemented one themselves.
The top reasons for moving workloads between clouds
Are You Having Trouble Selling DR to Senior Management?
This white paper gives you strategies for getting on the same page as senior management regarding DR. These strategies include:
Choosing the right cloud service for your organization, or for your target customer if you are a managed service provider, can be time consuming and effort intensive. For this paper, we will focus on existing applications (vs. new application services) that require high levels of performance and security, but that also enable customers to meet specific cost expectations.
Topics covered include:
Part 1 explains the fundamentals of backup and how to determine your unique backup specifications. You'll learn how to:
Part 2 shows you what exceptional backup looks like on a daily basis and the steps you need to get there, including:
Part 3 guides you through the process of creating a reliable disaster recovery strategy based on your own business continuity requirements, covering:
Leverage testing to ensure your change plan is successful
So it turns out that data doesn’t protect itself. And despite providing what might be the most secure and reliable compute platform the Universe has ever seen, Amazon Web Services (AWS) can’t guarantee that you’ll never lose data either. To understand why that is, you’ll need to face your worst nightmares while visualizing all the horrifying things that can go wrong, and then boldly adopt some best‑practice solutions as you map out a plan to protect yourself.
Read this ultimate guide to AWS data backup and learn about the threats facing your data and what happens when things go wrong, how to take risk head on and build an AWS data backup and recovery plan, and the 10 cloud data points you must remember for a winning strategy.
In this guide you will learn about Disaster Recovery planning with Zerto and its impact on business continuity.
In today’s always-on, information-driven business environment, business continuity depends completely on IT infrastructures that are up and running 24/7. Being prepared for any data related disaster – whether natural or man-made – is key to avoiding costly downtime and data loss.
Zerto’s DR solutions are applicable for both on-premise and cloud (DRaaS) virtual environments
Having a plan and process in place will help you mitigate the impact of an outage on your business
Download this guide to gain insights into the challenges, needs, strategies, and solutions for disaster recovery and business continuity, especially in modern, virtualized environments and the public cloud.
The author of this Pathfinder report is Mike Fratto, a Senior Research Analyst on the Applied Infrastructure & DevOps team at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Pathfinder reports navigate decision-makers through the issues surrounding a specific technology or business case, explore the business value of adoption, and recommend the range of considerations and concrete next steps in the decision-making process.
This report explores the following topics: