Hybrid work is here to stay, and it’s placing new demands on IT.
The traditional, device-centric approach to desktop delivery no longer works as well as it did. Staff routinely work miles from the office, connecting via unfiltered home Internet connections. They turn off their computers outside of business hours. And they may even use personal devices to access work systems.
To complicate matters, malware and ransomware attacks are growing more common.
Traditional desktop management strategies aren’t equipped for this new world.
There is a solution: switch from local desktops to virtual ones, accessed remotely.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) isn’t new, but it’s come into its own thanks to the technology maturing, and cloud service providers offering desktop-as-a-service options.
VDI has the potential to improve desktop manageability, security and support. It also boosts IT agility, so it may be worth considering implementing virtual desktops at your organisation.
Consistency and Simplicity in the Hybrid World
VDI decouples the desktop experience from the user’s underlying hardware. Users have a consistent workspace regardless of whether they’re on laptops, tablets, thin clients, or different operating systems.
For IT, this homogeneity is transformative. It removes the headaches of supporting diverse endpoints, especially for organisations that have a Bring Your Own Device policy. Troubleshooting is streamlined, and IT support staff have to deal with fewer variables.
Training becomes simpler, as the interface and applications are standardised.
This uniformity reduces support tickets related to hardware and software incompatibilities. VDI clients are lightweight, reducing the frustration faced by users with slow devices.
Virtual desktops also slash the complexity of running work applications on a wide range of personal devices. Mac users get the same desktops as PC users, for example.
Security and Compliance Built-In
VDI provides strong security benefits, especially for organisations in regulated sectors like legal services, financial services and healthcare. Data storage and processing stay in the datacentre, reducing risks arising from device loss and theft.
Even if a locked device is lost or stolen, there’s likely no confidential data exposure to report to customers or regulators—simplifying compliance.
Data loss prevention becomes straightforward. IT can enforce policies centrally without having to fully control device-specific OS settings. This balance between security and flexibility makes VDI ideal for sectors that demand confidentiality, while allowing remote work.
Patch management is also revolutionised. IT teams update golden images directly, with the VDI setup gently shepherding users towards up-to-date operating systems and applications. This reduces vulnerability windows and avoids users having their work disrupted by software updates.
Provisioning and Cost Efficiencies
In organisations that operate from multiple countries, provisioning and maintaining desktops can be a logistical challenge. Hardware often has to be shipped to the IT team for configuration, then re-shipped internationally to the end-user.
VDI simplifies this. Locally-hosted desktops can be provisioned from any country. Staff can be handed a generic locally-sourced laptop capable of running a lightweight VDI client. Devices no longer need to be shipped to and from the IT team first.
The modest hardware requirements of the VDI clients make it easy to extend devices’ useful lifespans. Old devices don’t need to be able to run the user’s desktop software, merely a VDI client and associated plugins.
Most power users can be given standard devices, rather than costlier, higher-spec models. The heavy-lifting can happen on the VDI host, instead of the local device.
VDI has another benefit: it makes hot desking less painful. Low-cost thin clients can allow users to access personalised desktops from any desk in the office. Users no longer need to lug their laptop into the office to have access to all their apps there.
Enhanced Manageability and Auditability
VDI makes life easier for your IT team. They can provision, monitor, tweak, and patch desktops via a single pane of glass. And they can do this at any time, regardless of whether users’ devices are switched on, and regardless of user location.
Usage and security audits become simpler too. With VDI, it becomes easier to demonstrate IT security compliance. You can more easily show which applications were installed on users’ work desktops, which traffic filtering measures were in place for a given user, which anti-virus measures were protecting against threats, and which data-loss prevention measures were preventing data leaks. Such clarity is harder to achieve via traditional desktops, especially if you are allowing staff and contractors to use their own devices and their own internet connections.
VDI lets your IT team allocate specific resources for intensive workloads without having to buy hardware that might otherwise be underutilised.
The Real-World Experience
Deploying VDI significantly reduces support requests once users have mastered the basics of how to log on, log off and reboot. IT’s focus shifts from managing physical devices to maintaining the virtual environment, simplifying troubleshooting considerably.
Integration with identity management systems further reduces administrative overhead, dynamically assigning access based on user roles.
Cloud-Hosted VDI Delivers Even More
If VDI’s so good, how come it’s not the norm? Traditional on-premises VDI can be costly and complex to deploy. There may be high upfront costs, high costs for ongoing support, scalability can be a challenge, and network latency can adversely impact the user experience.
However, cloud-hosted VDI is fixing these issues. It eliminates the need to buy and maintain servers for VDI use, it’s easy to deploy, it allows organisations to scale resources up or down rapidly according to business need. This helps organisations handle peaks in demand triggered by seasonal factors or project-based work.
Global datacentre footprints address latency and compliance issues. For example, UK users can be assigned a hosting pool in the UK, with data being stored and processed locally, simplifying GDPR compliance.
Major cloud VDI platforms provide built-in resilience, high availability, and strong platform-level DDoS protection. GPU-backed virtual desktops can deliver high levels of resources to power users, even if those users have standard-issue devices.
Backups, patching, provisioning, and desktop support become simpler.
A Brief Word on Legacy VDI Vendors
Industry stalwarts like Citrix and Omnissa (VMware’s former End-User Computing division) continue to offer popular on-premises VDI solutions. However, licensing can be restrictive, with long-term lock-ins and forced bundling that might not align with actual product usage. Managing these solutions typically requires significant vendor-specific knowledge. Scaling self-hosted solutions across multiple geographies can be costly.
By contrast, hyperscale cloud VDI offerings simplify VDI adoption and desktop management. This erodes the barriers to widespread VDI adoption.
VDI is Becoming a Core Option for Modern Desktop Delivery
Most organisations used to host and manage their own email server, their own phone-system PBXs, and their own internal file-sharing tools. Now, organisations are increasingly switching to cloud services to provide what once required server-room hardware.
Desktops are gradually heading to the cloud, at least for medium-to-large firms, for the same reasons: the cloud versions offer faster provisioning, pricing that mirrors usage, better scalability, better security, improved resilience and easier IT management.
Such shifts from traditional IT delivery to cloud delivery tends to happen once certain criteria are met.
Firstly, the total cost of ownership of the cloud version gets within touching distance of the fiddly, capital-intensive, slow, hard-to-scale, in-house alternative. VDI is already in the ball-park here, once you factor in the ample hidden costs of the traditional approach to desktop delivery. Though, this closeness in cost isn’t widely appreciated yet.
Secondly, firms that deliver core technology for the in-house solution switch to promoting the cloud-based alternative as their new default option. This switch usually happens as a result of the cloud-based offering being quicker and easier to deliver, and easier to sell.
Thirdly, for a cloud service to usurp its traditional delivery option, there have to be compelling reasons for businesses to switch to the cloud during their next technology refresh. Cloud VDI has these reasons in spades: you can upgrade without substantial capital expenditures, paying for just the capacity you need, while improving scalability, resilience, security and support.
And fourthly, the cloud version makes life easier for the humans tasked with buying the solution. Cloud-based VDI beats the traditional approach here too.
These four major factors point to cloud-based VDI becoming increasingly common in the years ahead.
Is Cloud-Based VDI Right For Your Organisation?
If you’d like to explore whether cloud VDI is right for your organisation, Syntura can help.
We can guide you through the options, including cloud-based VDI, on-premises VDI, and modern ways to managing traditional desktops in a secure way.
Call us on +44 (0)20 7847 4510, email info@syntura.io, or fill in this form and we’ll schedule a free initial consultation call with one of our technical experts.