The VDI Landscape: What Came Before and What's Possible Now

Digital transformation can be exciting, but it also can be painful. Organizations are trying to better support a growing mobile workforce that needs the flexibility to work from anywhere on any device. The ability to do so offers a distinct competitive advantage, as productivity soars. Virtualizing applications and desktops has been an important step toward achieving these productivity gains, but the first generation of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and application publishing solutions not only failed to deliver on cost savings and streamlined IT promises, but they contributed an overwhelming level of complexity that ballooned the operating expenses of these implementations - an unpleasant surprise.

Now, many organizations that implemented these first-generation solutions need to determine a migration strategy for this legacy VDI infrastructure, and it's a difficult proposition; some of that infrastructure has been untouched for more than a decade. Organizations don't want to - and can't - remain stuck with these costly and complex solutions, but moving forward can seem almost impossible.

As you evaluate your options for deploying a new implementation or migrating away from an old one, note that Gartner predicts that within two years, 50 percent of all VDI deployments will be Desktop as a Service (DaaS), which means that data center infrastructure and VDI control will be located in the cloud. In the meantime, though, the question for organizations that are nowhere near ready to go all-cloud is: How can IT best meet today's requirements for supporting users while also making sure their organization's VDI solution is future-proof and cloud-ready?

The Three Application and Desktop Delivery Scenarios
IT teams need to address three different app and desktop delivery scenarios to support the various computing needs of users:

• Deliver virtual desktops: IT uses full Windows 7 or Windows 10 virtual desktops for knowledge worker scenarios, in which users may need dozens or hundreds of applications.
• Deliver virtual applications: IT uses virtual app delivery when users already have a Windows endpoint. In this scenario, IT wants to deliver five to seven "problem" applications to those users. The most commonly deployed virtual applications are the browser and SAP.
• Deliver server-hosted desktops: IT uses server-hosted desktops for task worker use cases. In this scenario, end users need three to five applications and a familiar Windows interface on a thin client. Here, the most common use case is a call center.

Where We've Been: Legacy Application and Desktop Solutions Offer Little Choice
Until now, there was only one way to solve these problems: with legacy, on-premises solutions. IT teams spent months procuring hardware, architecting a solution and then deploying it. For full-on Windows desktop virtual machines, two large vendors have dominated the landscape for 10 or more years. As a result, these solutions have all the drawbacks of software that has been iterated over and over to a point of such complexity that they require very specialized skill sets (and therefore lots of money) to deploy and maintain.

Organizations looking to virtualize applications have typically chosen the most well-established provider, which for many years was the only game in town. Now, however, most of those same organizations face the choice of a major forklift upgrade or being left without support on outdated technology. For virtual desktops, the other large provider has gained ground, yet these customers struggle with all the same cost and complexity issues that come with implementing outdated technology on-premises. Now, both dominant vendors offer their legacy solutions in the cloud, but there are critical questions to ask these vendors if you're considering a cloud strategy. It's tough to figure out where to begin piecing together the fragmented solution set that will meet your unique needs, and yet there is growing recognition of the strategic value desktop and app virtualization bring to organizations of all sizes. Where do you even start?

What's Possible Now:  All Hail the Cloud!
Fortunately, the way forward has become clearer. With the advent of the public cloud as a viable option and development of cloud-native desktop and app virtualization technology, now IT can choose simpler, turnkey solutions to deliver on the three application and desktop delivery scenarios. You can leave behind the complexity of the past. IT can employ any combination of these scenarios - on-premises, in the cloud or both - depending on that organization's unique requirements for supporting users and complying with regulatory mandates. An IT team can manage all its desktops and apps, regardless of whether they're on cloud services or on-prem, from a single pane of glass.

Technology of this kind provides a one-stop shop - there's just one user interface for IT teams to manage everything, plus end users have a simple, elegant, unified workspace where they access all their apps, desktops and data on whatever device they want to use. What's more, deployment of the entire solution can happen in less than one day - a vast improvement over the average implementation timeline of many months that defines legacy solutions.

With all this good news comes a caveat: organizations looking to the cloud to simplify desktop and app delivery need to proceed cautiously as they navigate the options - drill down into the implementation details and ask all the hard questions of these vendors to avoid costly surprises.

No one can see into the future with complete accuracy, but expert analysts agree that the end-user computing landscape will evolve from the fragmented, single-tenant, complex, on-premises solutions to unified, multi-tenant, simple, scalable, cloud-native solutions. It's all great news for customers; there's no reason to look back.