Moving 350,000 Workstations to a New Network!

Business Challenge

How can the U.S. Navy quickly and securely move 350,000 workstations from the 20+ year old NMCI network (navy.mil) to the new Flank Speed (us.navy.mil) Zero Trust network without purchasing additional hardware, software or employing a large labor force to accomplish the transition? Adding to the challenge, a large portion of the workforce is still working remotely and do not have access to a physical NMCI network connection on a regular basis. 

PEO Digital Engineering was facing a large expansion of the Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Management (MECM) system to reimage workstations for the transition to Flank Speed. This MECM expansion would be very costly, labor intensive and time consuming for both the Government Information Technology Team, the primary contractor and most importantly, the End User community. Server hardware would need to be purchased and installed to augment the existing MECM infrastructure. Most likely, the MECM reimage solution would have required the user to come on base or send their workstation in for the transition to Flank Speed; sending in the workstation could leave the user without a physical workstation for several days. A reimage of the workstation would require a hard wired connection to the NMCI network and each workstation would take several hours to reimage and reload. There had to be a better way!

Falconwood’s Solution

Falconwood's team of End User Services Engineers examined the problem and decided to try a novel approach by restoring the workstation back to its factory base build. Based on past discussions, it was believed the NMCI imaging process overwrote the Microsoft Window restore feature. It was discovered that the restore feature was locked but still available. A short PowerShell script proved the feature could be unlocked and used successfully for the transition from NMCI to Flank Speed. It was also proved that the factory base build is updated when the workstation is updated so a workstation in transition will be on a current and patched version of the Windows Operating System during the transition period. 

Technical Deep Dive

The Windows 10 restore feature has been available for several years but unused on the NMCI network. Many years ago the feature was locked and left unused until now. By restoring the computer to Windows 10 base build and then running it through the Flank Speed Tenant join and build process, each user will get a refreshed Windows 11 workstation on the Flank Speed (us.navy.mil) Azure Cloud Tenant. The restore and rebuild process has been averaging less than 1 hour to a basic usable workstation configuration and then another few hours of specialty applications depending on the users requirements.  Results

Along with a few other utility items, the NMCI to Flank Speed transition script has already transitioned ~60,000 workstations consisting of various makes and models. In addition, it’s a win for the user community who can remotely transition their workstation in a few hours compared to coming on base for a reimaging process taking several hours. When you extrapolate a 6 hour time savings for each of the ~365,000 workstations needing to be transitioned, its comes to a 1.7 million user hours saved!