Is Hosted Virtual Desktop a good fit for me?

Have you been considering if Hosted Virtual Desktops would be good for your company?  Do you have concerns that Hosted Virtual Desktop is not a good fit for your organization?  If so, we will do our best to share which types of clients have had great success and some of the trade-offs.

For many organizations, Hosted Virtual Desktops can be a great fit.  There are many benefits that come along with Hosted Virtual Desktops.  At the same time there are some trade-offs that can cause internal strife and challenges if not dealt with or identified early in the process.

Leadership Pros vs. Cons

Sometimes the selection of Hosted VDI comes from the top.  A CEO or executive decides they don’t want to spend more time on IT and don’t want to beholden to a single IT person.  This can be good and bad.  The good news is that usually if their is high level buy in than you will probably get there.  The bad news – it can be bumpy.  Making sure you identify and address the TRUE concerns in the process is key.  It really comes down to change management and helping employees see A) what they are losing in advance B) making them comfortable with the change.  Take the time up front to get your internal and influencing resources with the Why before you force them down a path.  The more they understand the business decisions the more supportive they will support the project and more success.

Build vs. Buy

Is your organization the type that insists on building all of your IT infrastructure internally? If maintaining that level of control and touch is a high priority, Hosted Virtual Desktop is probably not a good fit. If every time you want to solve the problem the answer is to look and build something internally – there will be significant control issues in moving to a Hosted Virtual Desktop.  These include the following:

• End Users are locked down and CANNOT install new software themselves
• Web filtering can be enabled and users locked down to not be able to access everything via the internet
• Video doesn’t work well in hosted virtual desktops.  (It should see huge improvements in 2013)
• You have terrible connectivity – Hosted virtual desktops require quality bandwidth (Click her for info about hosted virtual desktop bandwidth requirements)
• You do not want any employee ever to work remotely

Proprietary Applications

Almost every company has secret sauce and that secret sauce almost always involves some IT Application and process.  In general we are pretty good at moving these to the cloud and dealing with some of the nuances of Hosting Secret Sauce Software.  However there are some things to be aware of before jumping into Hosted Virtual Desktops.

• Does your company deal with obscure peripherals?
• Are there elements of your IT infrastructure that are specific to your industry that require special and/or expensive software to integrate into your environment?
• Youu have some weird application that some guy named Bob created for you 10 years ago and you never heard from him again.

We approach every peripheral with high expectations that it will integrate with our network infrastructure, and thereby be available to you via your Hosted Virtual Desktop, but there is a testing and verification process we must go through with each new type of peripheral we come across. Our goal is to make your IT systems work. Period. If we can’t get your peripheral to cooperate, we will let you know it and we will have to explore other options.

Do you have other concerns about your organization’s compatibility with Hosted Virtual Desktop?

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