Customer Solution Case Study
/ Advertising Company Reduces Malware Incidents by 54 Percent with Browser Upgrade
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Media and entertainment
Customer Profile
Wunderman specializes in advertising and marketing services. Comprised of a global network of companies, Wunderman is headquartered in New York City and has more than 130 offices in 55 countries.
Business Situation
Wunderman relied on a mixed environment of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and Windows Internet Explorer 7. The older browsers introduced challenges such as insufficient security, limited user productivity, and compatibility with newer web standards and technologies.
Solution
To address these issues, Wunderman decided to standardize on Internet Explorer 8, which the company has already deployed to more than 50 percent of all PCs running the Windows operating system.
Benefits
· Enhanced security
· Improved user productivity
· Strong application compatibility
· Ease of deployment and management
· Powerful developer capabilities and tools / “In our New York Office alone, the security improvements in Internet Explorer 8 are expected to save 330 hours a year in IT effort related to cleaning or reimaging users’ systems.”
Opher Lichter, IT Director, Wunderman
Wunderman, a global network of advertising and marketing companies, was using older versions of Windows Internet Explorer that limited user productivity, did not support modern web standards and technologies, and were not designed to protect against today’s web-based threats. To address these issues, the company decided to standardize its computing environment on the Internet Explorer 8 browser. Since deployment, Wunderman has experienced several benefits from using the web browser, including enhanced security, boosted user productivity, and improved application development. Furthermore, Wunderman was able to realize these benefits quickly, with minimal investment and effort required to ensure compatibility with existing web applications and to deploy the browser.
Situation
Headquartered in New York City and with offices in 55 countries, Wunderman provides customized advertising and marketing services and solutions to customers around the world. Lester Wunderman, the company’s founder, is considered to be the creator of response-driven marketing. Early Wunderman innovations include the Columbia Record Club, the 1-800 toll-free number for businesses, and the magazine subscription card.
Wunderman has approximately 3,000 PCs that run different versions of the Windows operating system. As of 2009, 60 percent of those PCs ran Windows XP and 40 percent ran Windows Vista. The versions of Windows Internet Explorer browsers installed on those systems were similarly distributed, with 60 percent running Internet Explorer 6 and the remainder running Internet Explorer 7.
In mid-2009, Wunderman began to upgrade its operating environment from Windows XP and Windows Vista to Windows 7 as a means of increasing user productivity and reducing IT effort. Around the same time, the company considered ways to address the issues it faced with Internet Explorer 6 and, to a lesser extent, Internet Explorer 7, such as insufficient security, limited user productivity, and compatibility with newer web standards and technologies.
In the company’s New York office, which has about 400 Windows-based PCs, the help desk logged an average of 17 new malicious software (malware) issues a month. Technicians would spend one to four hours cleaning or reimaging a PC, which meant significant downtime and productivity lags for employees. “The World Wide Web has changed dramatically since Internet Explorer 6 was released, with web-based threats now much more common and sophisticated,” says Opher Lichter, IT Director at Wunderman. “In some cases, the malware had been posing a security risk for some time, but users weren’t aware that anything was wrong, or would wait until their PCs had been acting-up for a few weeks before calling for help.“
Compatibility with newer web standards and technologies was not only an issue for end users, but also for the developers who build and maintain the company’s many internal web applications. For example, developers couldn’t take advantage of new Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) standards, which are used to style webpages, and had to work around a lack of support for transparent portable network graphics (PNGs). “Maintaining compatibility with Internet Explorer 6, while coding for newer web standards, was very cumbersome,” says Lichter.
Wunderman soon concluded that it needed to upgrade its Internet browser. However, as with the planned upgrade to Windows 7, application compatibility was a concern. “Our New York office hosts 35 to 40 internally developed web applications, some of which are used worldwide,” says Lichter. “We also use several third-party web applications that are considered mission-critical and that are hosted both internally and externally. Without knowing that these applications would be compatible with a new browser, or how much effort it would take to make them compatible, it would have been risky to proceed with a browser upgrade.”
Solution
Wunderman decided to standardize its computers on Windows Internet Explorer 8 to help enhance security, boost user productivity, and benefit employees and IT staff in other ways.
Initial Evaluation
Wunderman began testing Internet Explorer 8 in mid-2009, starting with a limited pilot program within the company’s New York office. During the month-long phase, 30 to 40 IT personnel, early adopters, and developers evaluated the browser on an informal basis. “We really liked the new security features in Internet Explorer 8,” says Lichter, who quickly recognized several features in Internet Explorer 8 that would help contribute to improved security across the company.
For example, with Internet Explorer 8, users at Wunderman are warned when they attempt to visit known phishing sites, or sites that are known to distribute malicious software. Users can also see the domain name portion of a URL string highlighted in the Address Bar, making it easier to tell which sites they are on and aid them in identifying phishing sites and other deceptive sites.
Wunderman also saw value in security features that work silently in the background to help protect users. For example, Internet Explorer 8 works to detect type-1 cross-site scripting attacks and sanitizes those scripts to help prevent them from doing harm. The browser also helps protect against attacks that exploit memory-related vulnerabilities, such as a virus disguised as a picture.
Compatibility Testing
After the pilot, Wunderman participated in an Application Compatibility Factory engagement with CDW, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. During the one-week effort, Wunderman tested and remediated application compatibility for both desktop applications running on Windows 7 and web applications running on Internet Explorer 8. “We tested all important web applications, finding no major compatibility issues and identifying a dozen or so smaller issues that we could address with only minor coding changes,” says Lichter. “We also saw how the new Compatibility View feature in Internet Explorer 8 would let us use the Internet Explorer 7 rendering engine, giving us a means to avoid recoding some web applications.”
The engagement included several half-day sessions for developers and IT personnel, who now have new tools at their disposal to build rich web-based applications more quickly and easily because they no longer have to worry about compatibility with Internet Explorer 6. “We really got into the technical details in those sessions, coming out of them knowing exactly what to do and how to do it,” says Lichter. “Developers are excited about the CSS, AJAX, and Java enhancements in Internet Explorer 8, and they really like the browser’s new integrated Developer Tools.”
With the new Developer Tools, developers can edit and debug CSS and HTML, test and debug script, profile script performance, view or change the document object model, examine applied rules, and trace the origin of style values—all within a rich, visual environment that exposes the browser’s internal representation of a webpage as it runs, instead of just its source code.
Deployment and User Adoption
Within a few weeks, Wunderman had addressed all major compatibility issues and was ready to move forward with the upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. The company began deployment in the New York office in December 2009 and was more than 85 percent complete by June 2010. “We included Internet Explorer 8 as part of our Windows 7 image for all new PCs,” says Lichter. “We’re also upgrading PCs that aren’t due for a hardware refresh because the browser offers significant security, reliability, and productivity gains on its own.”
The initial reaction to Internet Explorer 8 among Wunderman employees has been consistently positive. “Before we upgraded, we sent out an email message highlighting the many benefits of the new browser,” says Lichter. “A few people were resistant to change, but after using Internet Explorer 8 for a few weeks, they didn’t want to go back. End users may not immediately appreciate the many security benefits provided by Internet Explorer 8, but the productivity gains it provides are apparent after only a few minutes’ use.”
Enhancements in Internet Explorer 8 that Lichter believes will be especially helpful in boosting user productivity include:
· Improved performance. Users will enjoy better performance due to the JavaScript engine in Internet Explorer 8, which is faster than in previous versions and improves the responsiveness of sites that are based on JavaScript or AJAX. Users also will enjoy better performance because Internet Explorer 8 cleans up memory more efficiently, resulting in better use of system resources.
· Easier navigation. Users can navigate to desired sites more easily by using the Address Bar in Internet Explorer 8, which enables them to type a few characters and see matches across their History, Favorites, and RSS Feeds. In addition, users can delete unwanted entries from the list of results—such as a previously mistyped website address.
· Improved tabbed browsing. Users at Wunderman will benefit from tabbed browsing and Tab Groups, which makes tabbed browsing easier. When one tab is opened from another, the new tab is placed next to the originating tab and both are marked with the same color, enabling users to quickly discern which tabs are related. Users will also benefit from the redesigned New Tab page in Internet Explorer 8, which provides links for using an Accelerator, starting InPrivate Browsing, reopening closed tabs, or reopening the last browsing session.
· Greater reliability. Users will experience less frustration and lost time due to poorly designed webpages because the tabs in Internet Explorer 8 run as separate processes. If a webpage causes a crash, that page is automatically restored and reloaded. In the unlikely event that the entire browser crashes, the entire session is restored.
· Instant access to online services. With Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8, users at Wunderman can access online services more easily while browsing the web—without having to manually navigate to a different site. Instead, they can select some text and right-click to select an Accelerator, upon which they are immediately presented with the results.
· Favorite data on the Favorites Bar. Users can take advantage of Web Slices in Internet Explorer 8 to bring information directly into the browser’s Favorites Bar, making it available wherever they go on the web. Changes to Web Slices are proactively retrieved by Internet Explorer 8 and their status is visually updated on the Favorites Bar.
Users at Wunderman who run Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 are more productive in additional ways. They see a thumbnail preview on the Windows Taskbar for every tab of every browser window they have open, which they can expand to a full-screen preview by hovering over the thumbnail with a mouse. Users can also take advantage of Jump Lists for Internet Explorer 8 on the Start menu and Windows Taskbar in Windows 7, which enable them to go to frequently and recently viewed websites with a single action instead of first opening the browser and then navigating to a site.
People running the latest desktop operating system from Microsoft also are benefiting from the desktop enhancements in Windows 7, which make working with multiple browser windows easier than ever. They can peek behind open windows to get a quick look at the desktop and view gadgets or files, or can hover the mouse over the far-right side of the Windows Taskbar to make all open windows transparent. Grabbing the top of a browser window and shaking it minimizes all of the other windows on the screen, and shaking the window again brings them all back. Users also can snap Internet Explorer 8 windows to screen borders, maximize a browser window by dragging its border to the top of the screen, and view two browser windows side-by-side by dragging the windows to opposite sides of the screen.
Next Steps
With the upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 almost complete, the Wunderman IT team in New York is promoting the browser as a worldwide standard and working to educate other Wunderman IT organizations. “We’re encouraging other IT departments to follow our lead and have documented everything we’ve learned,” says Lichter.
The team uses collaboration sites on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to assist other departments as they roll out Internet Explorer 8. The SharePoint sites include helpful information, such as how to code for application compatibility and use Group Policy settings in Active Directory to push out Internet Explorer 8 compatibility mode settings for defined websites.
Other offices are following fast, and many have realized that their desktop environments are ripe for an upgrade and aren’t waiting for a hardware refresh to get it into users’ hands. “We’ve already upgraded more than 1,700 PCs to Internet Explorer 8, and we plan to deploy it to 1,000 or so additional PCs over the next few months,” says Lichter. “The effort has been minimal and the benefits significant, making our adoption of Internet Explorer 8 a strong success.”
Benefits
Wunderman has experienced several key benefits from standardizing its computers on Internet Explorer 8. Employees are more productive, IT and help-desk personnel spend less time responding to malware incidents, and developers can deliver richer web applications with less work. Furthermore, because Internet Explorer 8 is designed for the enterprise, the company was able to realize these benefits quickly and cost-effectively, with little effort or investment required to ensure application compatibility and deploy the browser.