To succeed in today’s unpredictable economic times, business and technology leaders need to work together closely to cut out inefficiencies, reduce fixed operating expenses, and free up assets to invest in innovation. Unfortunately, years of mergers, acquisitions, and ad hoc growth have been acting as a barrier to this process, by saddling organisations with an overload of IT systems, software and data that squeezes the life out of IT resources.
As a result, traditional enterprise desktop environments are undergoing scrutiny because of the growing costs for support and maintenance, compounded by the necessity for frequent security patches and endless software upgrades. At the same time, end-user desktops have become increasingly difficult to manage as the explosion of remote workers continues to transform the client computing landscape. A recent analyst study from Forrester Research supports this view, indicating that within three years, there will be over one billion remote workers worldwide.
These users require immediate access to sophisticated organisational systems, from a diverse range of client devices. In addition, IT departments must contend with time-consuming client management tasks such as deploying and patching images and managing hardware transitions. They must also support the needs of all employees while diligently maintaining security policies. This is becoming increasingly challenging now that the majority of the workforce has stepped beyond the corporate environment.
In light of these demands and today’s budget constraints, many organisations are now exploring the possibility of outsourcing their virtual client technology. This approach helps simplify operations and get client assets under control through a fundamental change in perspective. If carried out correctly, it can replace managing physical desktops and hardware devices in various locations. Furthermore, it should also enable administrator access to data, settings, applications, operating systems, and IT policies that are uniquely associated with each user. This information, referred to as the user’s digital identity, resides in a central location on the network and allows individuals to access and work with their data from any supported device.
However, for this model to work effectively, an outsourcing provider must also have equivalent access to a company’s desktop environment. All applications, including custom or legacy applications, need to be tested and working at the service provider’s facility. This is not an easy task if the applications need to run on a different IT infrastructure. Unfortunately, the difficulty of application integration is often overlooked when businesses outsource their virtual client models. This is because the majority of businesses have custom or legacy applications that are critical to the business but not easily integrated into other IT environments. After all, not all IT departments are the same. Businesses can also incur unforeseen costs and delays trying to get these applications working with server-based computing technologies.
Simultaneously, and crucially, the organisation needs to establish the same level of security for the outsourcing provider that it maintains on the corporate network. Sending corporate desktop assets outside the protection of the corporate infrastructure, and in many cases outside of the country can have severe repercussions if customer data or company IP is compromised. Instead of maintaining entire PCs in the field with their own operating system, applications and configurations, virtualised PCs can be maintained in the corporate IT data center where individual user desktops can be more easily supported and securely managed. End users can then access their virtual desktop PCs from anywhere, from any system, with online access.
To conclude, organisations will only be able to outsource virtual client technologies successfully if they manage to strike the right relationship with their service provider and do not compromise their security or applications, which are fundamental to the running of the business. Only then will they be able to reap the rewards of outsourcing virtual client technologies, such as reduction unforeseen maintenance costs, improved service level agreements, and crucially, no delays when trying to get business critical applications working alongside server-based computing technologies.
