Nexthink announced research showing that Virtual Desktop
Infrastructure (VDI) procurement and management processes are riddled with
contradictions.
The survey
of 1000 frontline IT workers found that:
- 92% say the employee experience is an important
consideration when choosing a VDI solution
- However, 91% admit that cost considerations trump
performance when choosing a provider
- 95% believe that VDI offers an equal or better
experience than desktops
- Yet 92% confess that it has primarily been
designed to make life easier for IT, rather than the end-user
The cost of these contradictions is significant, with
a third of organizations (31%) reporting daily VDI issues that require L3 VDI
specialist support, and a further 40% having them on a weekly basis, as L1 and
L2 support are often unable to manage the complexity of VDI. This means that,
despite a key driver of VDI deployment being the ability to better control
costs, enterprises are having to spend huge sums on operationalization and
maintenance.
The confusion over VDI is further compounded by the
fact that a substantial proportion of these escalated issues were not
necessarily specific to VDI. Application functionality failures (54%) and slow
performance (47%) accounted for two of the top three most reported issues to IT
teams, neither of which are necessarily related to VDI.
"What this shows is that, while VDI has a lot of
potential advantages around scalability, accessibility, and security, most
organizations still aren't able to reap those benefits," said Samuele Gantner,
Chief Product Officer, Nexthink. "A key issue is that delivering a desktop is
only one part of making VDI work - users also need seamless access to
applications and data. Therefore, for VDI to be successful, it must work in
harmony with dozens of external elements. The problem is that businesses have
little to no visibility into how those integrations are working, so, rather
than being able to identify root causes, they simply blame VDI and the cycle
continues."
In order to address these issues, businesses need a
unified view over all VDI sessions with end-to-end visibility and automated
workflows to enable remediation with minimal interruption to the user
experience. Moreover, having instant insight into where problems are occurring
can remove the blame game between functions and enable better collaboration
both within IT departments and with the wider organization.
"Ultimately, IT teams are in a lose-lose situation
right now," added Gantner. "They're accountable for the experience delivered by
VDI, but they're not being given the tools to effectively manage and improve
it. And without the ability to answer core questions such as; who is being
affected, what is the source of issues, when did issues start, and is there a
wider pattern, IT is always going to be playing whack-a-mole while continually
being blamed by the rest of the business."
To find out more about the challenges of VDI
management, click here for the full report.