Transforming Desktops As You Secure The Enterprise

Globalization and Digital Transformation is disrupting businesses in all markets. How can you use your IT infrastructure as an asset to drive business growth?

The rise in globalization has created meaningful commercial opportunity for companies looking to expand into new markets with their goods and services, but the biproducts of a managing a twenty-four hour work cycle, distributed workforce, and a customer base in many different countries has created meaningful technology challenges that enterprises must address to ensure a positive customer experience and maintain profitability while scaling their global operations. Moreover, while there has been an explosion in innovative technologies that promise increases in productivity, lower total cost of ownership, and improved security, determining which technologies are worth investing in and then managing the implementation once selected is arduous. Few Enterprises have the requisite expertise to stay current with the plethora of technology advancements, develop a strategy to architect a system that is additive to prior technology investments, and that aligns with their roadmap for customer and market development. The problem is exacerbated as you go down to the (small-medium enterprise) SME segment as they have the same opportunities for growth and needs when it comes to technology innovation, but lack the scale to invest in dedicated resources to manage their technology environment.

To thrive in a rapidly changing business climate, an organization must become agile in its business practices to adapt to changes, but it also needs a nimble IT infrastructure that supports a wide range of differing requirements across multiple business units to implement these changes without disrupting operations. At its core, IT infrastructure is comprised of critical applications used to run operations – including business intelligence (BI), enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) – the server environment to host all these applications (whether on-premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid of both), end-user compute resources (desktops, laptops, thin clients, POS terminals, etc) that allow users to access these applications and systems, and networking to link it together. 

(Info.flexera.com, 2020)

While much of the innovation in the enterprise space has focused on new vertically specific applications, the server environment in which they are hosted on, or the network “plumbing”, the actual end-user compute resources may be the most ripe for near-term disruption given the rise in mobility, desktop virtualization, and bring your own device (BYOD) that are significantly impacting enterprise IT management. It growth was slotted for 1/3 of CEO’s top business priorities according to Gartner.

(Gartner, 2020)

Also, according to Gartner, IT service failure and cybersecurity accounted for 30% and 25% respectively of the types of Disruptions that happened in a business over the past four years. 

(Panetta, 2020)

Traditional Desktop Computing 

Traditional Desktop Computing as we know it today, started in the 1980’s with the need for word processing and was a means of digitizing the typewriter. Then, through advancements in compute processing and hardware innovation, devices became more powerful and compact -- desktop computers evolved into laptops and then smart phones -- many of which can support the memory and compute required to run critical business applications. 

However, these innovations also led to new problems. On the security side, portable devices containing sensitive corporate information broadened the security exposure of an enterprise. Another challenge arose as employees began to get multiple devices that had access to enterprise systems including laptops and mobile devices (to support work outside of traditional business hours), the latter often being personal devices where enterprise applications were loaded. While these innovations certainly increased productivity they also increased the management burden and security risks of enterprises.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

To combat these risks, a new method of end-user computing was developed. In a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (“VDI”) model the desktop, including all of the associated compute, applications and data, is virtualized and resides on hardware in the data center (or cloud). This allows the entire workspace to be delivered securely, reliably, and dynamically depending on specific user requirements (see Exhibit 3).

Further, VDI is the foundation for an IT service delivery platform that has the means to deliver critical workflows to any device, any place, and on-demand. This model allows for rapid deployment and ease of management of all aspects of the virtualized workspace to provide flexibility and resource savings.

The objective of VDI is to provide a means of rapidly provisioning workers with a productivity and desktop environment – with only the applications pertinent to their job function – to further business initiatives without compromising the security of the environment. 

(Twitter.com, 2020)

Current Desktop Situation

Best practice today is to refresh IT hardware every 3 years. This results in IT managers having to ‘move’ all data from one computer to the next. For employees, the experience may be simple taking a few hours, however for more complex desktop configurations, it can take weeks before they are operating in a pre-migration state, causing decreased productivity and user frustration in the interim. In most cases the migration is simply a hardware change, to ensure that the device is covered by a support contract. Additionally, these upgrades are done to ensure the device can support changing software or peripherals standards.

Today when a computer fails, requires servicing, or is on backorder for a new hire, we try and reduce the downtime to the employee. In some cases, we will configure a “loaner” computer. However, despite our best efforts it often results in a sub-par user experience due to limited resources on these loaner machines. Moreover, if a device has a hardware failure such as a hard drive malfunction, they may even lose work saved on the machine resulting in a significant loss of time and even valuable data.

The team has been reevaluating the need for brick and mortar office spaces for all employees. With a rising cost and a distributed global workforce, it no longer makes business sense to have traditional offices for all employees. Many roles have been identified as candidates for remote or mobile eligibility and will not have dedicated space at any location – they may occasionally work from a shared office/non-company facility. With the rise in Consumerization of IT (the cycle of IT emerging in the consumer market, then spreading to business and government organizations) and Tablet devices a growing percentage of employees are demanding the ability to use their own devices to access corporate tools. The existing policy allows employees (using standard hardware identified by IT) to connect their devices (tablets, mobile, etc.) to get email access. However, basic email access is no longer satisfying the needs of our employees. They are demanding access to all of their data and commonly used applications on a variety of devices to enable 24/7 connectivity and access as a means of increasing productivity.

Business Drivers

The business drivers that strengthen the case for deployment of VDI across the enterprise include:

·      Data Security / Preservation

o  Our organization placed greater emphasis on security including the securing of intellectual property

o  Heighten security on the network

o  Leverage high-availability datacenter infrastructure for automated disaster recovery

·      Lower Total Cost of Ownership

o  Use “Thin Clients” requiring less maintenance and a longer lifespan

o  Reduce the cost of application delivery and desktop maintenance support

o  End-Point Reductions – Growing need to reduce physical ‘desktop’ device inventory (currently at two per employee)

o  Automate and simplify device provisioning

·      Improve Endpoint Management / Employee User Experience

o  Security Patches – significant disruption caused by frequent deployment of security patches, requests to restart the computer, and other desktop related changes

o  Provide Desktop and application access to devices otherwise unable to support them

o  Bring the Desktop into the Datacenter in closer proximity to applications and data

o  Efficiently manage of branch offices and remote workers

o  Extend the workplace via ubiquitous enterprise access on any device

In addition to these drivers, having a production environment with active clients would provide a great platform for engineering to develop, deploy, and test virtualized applications before releasing them to our customers.

The Opportunity

By implementing a VDI solution, the following goals will be achieved:

·      Desktop Replacement – Ability to choose devices that provide a robust, high performance Desktop like experience without the management burden or risk of deploying a physical desktop

·      Mobile Workforce – Enable employees to work Anytime / Anywhere / On Any Device

·      Service Delivery – End-User experience delivery simplified with access to Applications / Data / Content in real-time

·      Single Point of Control and Management – Centralized and consistent delivery of all critical business workflows and resources from a single point of access for end-users to all productivity devices, control of that environment from a single solution platform

·      Bring your own Device (BYOD) – Enabling a Bring Your Own Computer / Device program that supports a ubiquitous experience whether the device is corporate issued or employee owned

In its evaluation of VDI, it is essential to weigh the costs of the project with the benefits obtained, while taking into consideration the limitations of its current desktop delivery model. An adoption of VDI will significantly enhance the IT Organization’s capabilities while enabling it to be agile in service delivery and flexible to adapt to changing user needs or enterprise wide requirements.

The Challenge

The existing business model has silo’s that are each responsible for a specific area of the business including applications, network, virtualization, storage, and desktops. With the proposed solution this would require for each of these teams to come together and figure out how the ongoing support will be managed.

The other challenge will be to get the workforce to adopt new practices and workflows for how they use their VDI machine. They will have to stop using all native functionality in their device and make sure that they do all of the work inside the VDI machine. 

If there is no network connectivity, then users will not have access to their machine nor any underlying corporate data.

Long term expenses including replacement of both server resources and end-points, however the refresh cycle of both should be longer in the VDI model. Other expenses include future software upgrades or scalability of additional resources as new employees are added over time.  

Graphic References

Gartner. (2020). Gartner Survey Reveals That CEO Priorities Are Shifting to Embrace Digital Business. [online] Available at: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-05-01-gartner-survey-reveals-that-ceo-priorities-are-shifting-to-embrace-digital-business [Accessed 26 Feb. 2020].

Info.flexera.com. (2020). Flexera 2020 IT Spending Survey | State of Tech Spend. [online] Available at: https://info.flexera.com/SLO-REPORT-State-of-Tech-Spend-2020 [Accessed 26 Feb. 2020].

Panetta, K. (2020). CIO Agenda 2020: Do You Have A Clear and Consistent Business Strategy?. [online] Gartner.com. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/cio-agenda-2020-do-you-have-a-clear-and-consistent-business-strategy/ [Accessed 26 Feb. 2020].

VMware. (2020). What is Desktop Virtualization? | Application Virtualization Products | VMware. [online] Available at: https://www.vmware.com/products/desktop-virtualization.html [Accessed 26 Feb. 2020].

Twitter.com. (2020). Twitter. [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/DellWyseVDI/status/1160895712508428293 [Accessed 26 Feb. 2020].

The SHI Blog. (2020). Everything you think you know about VDI is wrong. Let’s set the record straight. | The SHI Blog. [online] Available at: https://blog.shi.com/cloud/everything-you-think-you-know-about-vdi-is-wrong-lets-set-the-record-straight/ [Accessed 26 Feb. 2020].