The first question every IT support person asks when you call them up about a problem with your computer: “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Then, depending on the nature of the problem, you can get into a lengthy process with the support team trying various things to get your system up and running again: a process that consumes a lot of time and reduces IT team’s productivity to zero until normal operation is restored.
Gartner estimates the average cost of contacting help desk support to be $US23.09, and of course, it does not include the cost of lost user productivity.
Power-on and power-off will not always fix every malfunctioning computer but you can ensure it does with the help of a reboot to restore software.
The software runs unobtrusively in the background on your computer. It preserves a baseline configuration of the machine that is determined by, and can only be changed by an administrator.
Reboot to restore technology like Deep Freeze redirects information that would normally be written to the hard drive to an allocation table, leaving the information on the hard drive unchanged.
When the computer is restarted this allocation table is no longer referenced and the original hard drive data is used instead, so any changes that are made to the baseline configuration since the last restart are discarded.
These changes could include newly installed applications — providing protection from the possible legal action for the use of unlicensed software installed by students in classrooms or random user in business centers— and, most importantly, malware, which is often introduced through a successful phishing exercise. With reboot to restore software, a simple reboot will eliminate all such threats.
Reboot to restore software like Deep Freeze, has reportedly helped reduce support tickets by up to 63 percent.
And fewer support calls means fewer IT support people. Organisations that are using Deep Freeze have found on average, that each IT support person can support 12 percent more desktops.
A US-based multi-specialty healthcare provider had 250 workstations spread across different locations and found it extremely difficult to complete critical tasks when a vast majority of their systems were found to be infected.
By deploying reboot to restore technology on all machines, IT teams were able to reduce the system recovery time from four hours to just two minutes.
