Staying current with the latest hardware technology is challenging for organisations of any size, especially for small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) that are often extra challenged with limited resources and personnel.
By: Manish Sharma
It’s no surprise that today’s SMBs are moving toward desktop virtualization, which offers a cost-effective approach and a viable alternative to traditional PCs.
Employees can easily access their desktop environment from anywhere through LAN, WAN (including broadband from home) and the like at any time.
Desktop virtualisation delivers all the computer performance, manageability and security required for businesses, with significant cost savings compared to buying and maintaining PCs.
Desktop virtualisation makes sense for SMBs as IT budgets are expected to grow and accommodate BYOD (bring your own device) and cloud office environments, while the staff size will remain the same. Specifically, desktop virtualization offers the following benefits to SMBs:
Long-term reduction in IT costs: Continual management of multiple individual PCs, desktops and handheld devices is time-consuming, cumbersome and costly. Already strapped IT staff members can leverage desktop virtualisation technologies, such as Ncomputing’s, to control and make system-wide updates and upgrades from a single centralised source, rather than updating workstations and BYOD devices one by one. In the long run, desktop virtualisation offers a reduction in administrative and maintenance costs.
Improved security and compliance: SMBs are particularly concerned about the management of their end users–with security and compliance topping the list. For example, laptops are stolen or sometimes lost at public places like airports. This results in loss of business-critical information. SMBs can turn to desktop virtualization to meet security and compliance mandates by moving data off end points and into the data centre where it can be securely managed. Compared to a conventional desktop, a virtualized desktop is more secure given that its data never leaves the data centre.
Increase in employee productivity: In typical scenarios, a desktop machine going down means lost productivity as that employee has to wait around for the workstation to be repaired. The immediate ability to access the same desktop from a different device means no more lost time when such IT problems arise. Also, since desktop virtualization supports BYOD devices such as laptops, tablets and smart phones, it supports the demand for a virtual working environment and immediate access to information.
What is desktop virtualisation?
A vast majority of PC users use only a fraction (about 10%) of a computer’s capacity. The rest of it is wasted. Desktop virtualization technology taps into this unused capacity so that multiple users can share a single PC. All users run their own applications—and have their own files, settings and preferences—without the bulk, without the expense, without the cost of a dedicated PC. Since desktop virtualization enables optimal use of computing resources, this lowers the acquisition and deployment cost of computers, besides significantly reducing the total cost of operation (TCO).
The author is vice-president, APAC, NComputing Inc