VDI is a technology with some remarkable capabilities when set up correctly or a cranky beast when left unattended. Consider these 15 superpowers you can achieve with your VDI workspace.
1. Give employees a brand-new computer every day. VDI can give you a new desktop every morning, making sure personal preferences and customizations are always there to optimize the experience and productivity.
2. Give employees desktop computers that follow them around all day, accessible from any computer they use to log in. VDI can deliver the same desktop and set of applications to as many different endpoints as you care to log into during the day. That might be logging into a computer at home, early in the morning, to check some email with your morning coffee, then logging in at your desk at work. A meeting later in the afternoon might be an opportunity to log in from your tablet or log in from your phone to do a quick review of a presentation before you go home for the day.
3. Improve security, protect sensitive data, and make sure that data never leaves the data center. A VDI workspace improves security by preventing data from leaving the data center. There is no risk of information being lost from a stolen laptop if there is no data stored on the computer in the first place.
4. Deliver a great desktop experience anywhere there is a good Internet connection. VDI can deliver desktops and applications to almost any device, anywhere in the world. Have good Internet, will travel.
5. Keep employees connected and collaborating regardless of where they live. VDI can connect remote, isolated employees in groups and facilitate collaboration across the company network. Employees can work from anywhere and be protected like they are working on the company network, because they are.
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6. Protect Intellectual Property. VDI can protect intellectual property by allowing remote teams to collaborate on documents without taking them off the company network.
7. Enable employees to work how and where it makes sense to meet the needs of the customer. VDI can enable a mobile user population. The examples are numerous, from hospital staff moving from computer to computer while working throughout a hospital unit, students needing versatile computer labs accessible from any lab in any building, or Chromebooks or their laptops. Retail, banking, and insurance company employees that need to work from multiple locations or, more typically with insurance, at a client’s home or the site of a disaster are all everyday use cases.
8. VDI simplifies mergers and acquisitions (M&A). By merging multiple IT infrastructures quickly, you can minimize the need to support multiple IT infrastructures along with the cost and staffing requirements associated with the effort. Employees can leave on Friday working for two companies with two different IT infrastructures and return on Monday to one or two companies, but with a single consolidated infrastructure. VDI can give each employee just the applications they need to do their job, regardless of which company they work for, often from a single image or template.
9. Enable employees to work with computers in hostile environments. VDI brings compute technology to places that are traditionally hostile to computer infrastructure. Manufacturing floors, oil rigs, farm fields, battleships, etc., are just some of the hostile environments that can kill standard computers and technology that are places where VDI thrives. With endpoints (computers, etc.) that have no moving parts, dirt, oil, grease, etc., are not nearly as destructive to computing infrastructure.
10. Hire the best talent regardless of where they are and connect them with the team through VDI. VDI allows companies to find the best talent globally, if necessary, to work for their firms and still have a way to connect them to the team, not just the talent available around their offices.
*If you're using Citrix and considering deploying Microsoft Teams, be sure to check out our deployment guide:
11. Deliver a great desktop experience for any device employees may want to use. VDI does not care if employees want to use a Mac, Dell laptop, Wyse thin client, Samsung tablet, Chromebook, or iPhone. The technology will work on whatever screen size and OS are available.
12. Reduce the amount of code and number of versions when developing applications. Related to this, VDI reduces coding for applications for organizations that develop applications. Applications can be coded once and delivered to endpoints using Windows, Apple, Linux, Android, or IOS operating systems. This gives you smaller apps, less code, and versioning to manage.
13. Maximize the IT budget by paying for desktops when you need them and stop paying for them when you don’t. VDI can power the as-a-service economy, providing desktops as a service on a consumption basis. There when you need them and gone when you don’t.
14. Extend the life of legacy applications in the cloud age. VDI can make heavy, slow legacy applications nimble and breathe new life into them by reducing the bandwidth needed to deliver a great end-user experience when off the local company network.
15. VDI can simultaneously deliver graphics-intensive applications (i.e., Catia, Revit, AutoCAD, etc.) with a great end-user experience to designers all over the world. The design of the Boeing Dreamliner is a tangible example of this capability. Forty-five companies from around the globe came together, each responsible for elements of the aircraft, and successfully collaborated on a single 2.7-million-part model using one of the most graphically demanding CAD/CAM/CAE applications in the world, Dassault Systèmes CATIA.
The PC is the defacto standard for what we expect the computing experience to be like because we have almost all had a keyboard under our fingers at one time or another as a shared common experience. There are places where the PC (or Mac, etc.) is more capable than VDI, but there are places VDI can deliver in ways the PC never will be able to.
VDI can deliver a PC-like experience. Login times should be sub-30 seconds, though we have seen login times as fast as five seconds. VDI can provide a great experience, but it must be architected and optimized to squeeze every drop of performance out of the technology.
If you would like VDI to deliver some of the identified superpowers for your organization or fix a VDI environment that is not working as expected or is experiencing slowness, schedule a time to meet with one of our VDI experts and see it in action..
Whitehat resolves one-off incidents, completes assessments, and remediates Citrix, VMware Horizon, NetScalers, and Citrix ADC environments and devices. Whitehat also manages or co-manages Citrix or VMware Horizon 24/7/365, delivering consistency and maximizing its performance. There is always help available and it is often guaranteed.