The provisioning of PCs is much simpler in a virtualized environment. Desktop Virtualization technology has progressed into a technology that is essential to future IT operations. With traditional desktops, there are high cost and resource demands that come with managing a wide variety of client form factors, multiple generations of operating systems and hundreds of applications. Traditional desktop environments require constant maintenance and support to repair problems and retain compliance with corporate policy. Virtual Desktops help eliminate all of these traditional challenge, and provide users with a high definition desktop experience that can be utilized from anywhere with any client device.
Elegrity has deployed virtual desktops across several industries and user classes, some examples of easily transitioned desktop environments are detailed below:
Administrative / Task Workers
For the general office worker, whose needs are usually limited to e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and web-based applications, VDI is a natural fit. Though the argument can be made for buying low-cost commodity PC’s for the office staff, no cost savings would be achieved because the IT overhead costs are the same for administering a low-end PC and a high-end PC. Costs saving through VDI are realized through reduced overhead, reduced administrative costs, reduced energy consumption, reduced capital costs and reduced help desk costs.
Offshore / Contingent Workforce
VDI reduces capital costs and administrative overhead for companies that have a workforce offshore or have outsourced work to offshore or onshore business partners. With VDI, non-employee workers have access to a rich work environment which results in greater productivity at a fraction of what it would have cost utilizing traditional access provisioning methods. Costs for additional IT support staff, IT labs, new computers are avoided while at the same time increasing productivity from remote workers and attaining better business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. Also, since the data and the infrastructure is located within your data center, security and data loss or theft is less of a concern than it would be with traditional PC’s.
Certain industries such as biopharmaceuticals are mandated to have validated systems for a portion of their organization and processes that require traceability in their functions. With VDI, a validated desktop can be deployed and moved around far more quickly than a traditional PC. And since the desktop image is locked down and housed wholly with the datacenter the validation process for a VDI image is far easier than for a traditional PC.
VDI is a perfect match for manufacturing facilities. Unlike the general office worker, manufacturing staff do not sit in front of PC’s most of day and often used shared PC’s to access e-mail, update statuses, order additional material, report problems, etc. As a result, a VDI desktop environment provides the perfect combination of security, mobility and consistency needed within a manufacturing facility.
Development environments require compilers, source control, and version control. Depending of the nature of the product being developed, developers to some degree, require greater control and autonomy over their development environment and typically require more than one platform (multiple developer environments; multiple dev, test, staging environments for integration testing, etc.).
In a development environment where there are customized configurations and, potentially, intellectual property on residing on development PC’s the risks of a hardware failure, data loss and intellectual property compromise are enormous. By putting one’s application development into a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution, developers can continue to enjoy the autonomy they need while your organization maintains strict controls over provisioning, access and data location.
By moving the development into VDI the data is moved away from the desktop endpoint and into the protection of the data center. When development occurs on VDI, any open files and work in progress such as checked out code is preserved in the VDI session in the data center. VDI environments can be designed from the ground up to suit the unique demands and needs of external users logging in from various locations throughout the world (such as offshore development teams).
Contact us today to find out more about our Virtualization Starter Packs and see how fast we can help you move forward with this essential technology!
