Jay Leonard
Agility and flexibility are two components that every business, large or small can greatly benefit from. These two attributes will undoubtedly be among the more important attributes that differentiate the successful companies from those that struggle in the future. This is one of the many reasons why the employment of virtual desktops is an emerging trend among many small and medium sized businesses.
Giving the IT Department Greater Control
The Implementation of a virtual desktop infrastructure greatly reduces the amount of time it takes an IT department to provision new desktops while resulting in greater control. Costs for ongoing support of desktop management are greatly reduced as well. Virtual desktops enable the IT department to manage, store and secure everything centrally.
VDI has vanquished the need for IT to deal with individual devices when doing installs, updates, patch applications, backing up files and virus scans., a lot of time, energy, and grief, is also eliminated when a successful VDI is implemented.
Using Virtual Desktops to Reduce Costs
According to some reports, the amount of money to be saved by eliminating the traditional costs of managing and maintaining PC hardware and software on a host of individual devices can be substantial. Desktop Virtualization results in more efficient utilization of resources and energy. When the IT department is freed up from hardware management, costs are greatly reduced and more human resources can be devoted to other objectives.
Extending the Life of Existing Devices
Another tremendous advantage of virtual desktop infrastructure is that a company can greatly extend the life of their older client devices. When additional devices are needed, thin clients can be acquired, significantly costing less than the acquisition of fat clients. (A thin client is a device that runs directly off of a network to run various applications and perform tasks and therefore does not need to have its own memory, storage and computing power to do these functions independently).
VDI Can Greatly Facilitate BYOD
Another emerging trend with small and medium businesses is BYOD. By allowing employees to bring and use their own devices to do their work, huge expenses can be eliminated by the company. This trend provides much greater agility and flexibility to a company’s workforce. Naturally, if the IT department had to maintain and support a diverse array of devices, a nightmare would ensue. Fortunately, VDI largely solves this problem by with a virtualized and centralized environment.
End Users Are the Driving Force
In past years, technology was driven by IT departments but that has changed. Within the last decade, the advent of smart phones and what some technologies are referring to the consumerization of IT revolution, users are now on the cutting edge of technology.
This trend is arguably the single biggest factor that has set the stage for the BYOD phenomenon. Interestingly, about 50% of the small to medium businesses using the BYOD model are requiring their employees to cover all of the costs associated with hardware, voice and data services which can cost upwards of $80 per month. Because of all of these factors, a VDI makes a lot of sense for small and medium business and result in a more agile and flexible workforce.
Are you planning to adopt VDI in your small business? Share your thoughts in the comments.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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You make great points to the practicality of virtual desktops for SMBs, but don’t you think VDI implementation might be too complicated for the smaller SMBs without dedicated IT resources? We were in that exact position and trying to figure out what to do. and chose a virtual desktop vendor (solvco.com) instead. We only have 12 people now, so VDI might be a better fit in the future but for now it’s a better deal for us to pay someone else to do it for us.
While there are some relevant points made, I think the article neglects the costs associated with the build out of a VDI Infrastructure, especially one that meets the criteria described. VDI for the SMB market makes the most sense early in the planning phases of the IT environment. Unfortunately, most SMBs evolve their IT strategy and plans as is necessary and there isn’t much long term planning. Hosted VDI makes much more sense as noted by SMBIT, however, the field is not mature enough to deal with latency, security, and cost effectively yet.