Laptop users now represent half of the workforce in many organizations — a testament to the growing mobility trend. Most mobile employees do the majority of their work on company-owned laptops managed by the IT department. In many companies, however, a growing number of end-users do their work on laptops that are not controlled by IT. This group includes contractors who bring their own devices to a project, as well as employees who use their own laptops at work as part of a bring-your-own-computer (BYOC) program.
These trends impose significant burdens on the IT department. Deploying and managing traditional desktops already represents one of the greatest challenges facing IT managers, and the job just keeps getting more difficult due to the constant need for application upgrades, operating system patches and antivirus updates. Mobility and the growing use of user-owned devices only exacerbate the problem. It’s hard to manage equipment you don’t own, and harder still to secure and support a diverse collection of hardware and software that literally changes every day.
Desktop virtualization can help. The latest desktop virtualization solutions support mobility by enabling access to virtual desktop images using any network-connected device. This shifts the IT support burden from the end-user’s smartphone or tablet onto the server-based desktop image. Standards-based virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs) and mobile devices with built-in VDI capabilities promise a new paradigm that enables mobility and BYOC programs while helping to relieve the IT support burden.
Managing a typical end-user desktop can cost more than $5,000 a year, which means companies literally spend billions of dollars trying to manage desktop PCs across far-flung enterprises. This cost can spiral out of control when mobile devices are added to the mix. Adoption of desktop virtualization solutions is being driven by the need to reduce this TCO equation as well as by the demand for a more flexible, independent and secure computing environment.
Desktop virtualization addresses some of the most troublesome problems facing IT today — desktop administration, data security and technology refresh costs — while satisfying workers’ demands for mobility. IT is freed from the tasks of patching operating systems, installing and updating applications, and ensuring that data is protected on each and every desktop. Workers get to use their preferred devices.
With desktop virtualization, a server hosts an entire desktop environment specific to each user. Virtual machine images are built and stored on the server and delivered to end-users on demand. These images can be customized with the operating system, applications, security settings and other personalization features required by specific users.
With these virtual images stored in a central server, users have the ability to access their personalized computing environments as long as they have a way of connecting to that central source. Organizations also have the ability to leverage public or private clouds, where key business applications can be accessed anytime, anywhere, from any network-connected device.
Desktop virtualization and cloud computing platforms provide a framework for mobility by consolidating and centralizing complete desktop environments and introducing an element of flexibility to the delivery of technology services. Workers become more productive because they can get their full desktop experience from any location, and IT becomes more efficient by managing a large number of desktop environments from the data center.
For workers who use company-owned laptops, the best solution is a virtual desktop that runs directly on their laptop. This approach gives IT the central management and security benefits of server-hosted virtual desktops, while users gain the flexibility to be disconnected from the network that comes with traditional, locally installed desktops. And because the desktop runs in a local virtual machine at all times, users never have to go through the cumbersome, time-consuming process of “checking-out” their virtual desktop by downloading it from a central server each time they leave the office.
Employees and contractors who bring their own devices to work generally do not want IT installing software on their personal laptops, nor does IT want to take on the cost and hassle of managing personal devices. IT’s primary goal in these scenarios is to ensure these workers are productive, and that any corporate data on their personal laptops is secure at all times. For user-owned devices, the simplest solution is to deliver the corporate applications these users need as an on-demand service, while ensuring that any data created by those corporate apps is automatically encrypted.
Smartphones, media tablets and other mobile devices have rapidly introduced new mobile applications into the IT world. IDC expects mobile computing to continue to explode in 2011, with shipments of application-capable, non-PC mobile devices outnumbering PC shipments within the next 18 months.
Many of these devices will support desktop virtualization — Cisco recently introduced a media tablet with built-in VDI support, and other device manufacturers have announced alliances with VDI vendors. Indeed, some experts see desktop virtualization as the next mobile device “killer app.”
The ability to run secure, centrally managed virtual machines directly on end-user devices enables companies to adopt large-scale BYOC programs for mobile devices. Instead of receiving generic, standard-issue laptops from IT when they join the company, employees in a BYOC program can receive vouchers that can be applied to the purchase and support of any device they choose. At the same time, desktop virtualization makes it possible for IT to successfully support and manage the growing number of mobile devices.
