The Contradictions of VDI: Is Your Investment Delivering the Desired Performance?
The promise of Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is deeply compelling - by virtualizing desktops, businesses can simultaneously give employees more flexibility and improve their productivity, while also reducing costs. However, despite significant VDI investment, too many organizations are still unable to realize these promised benefits.
More often than not, VDI is causing IT teams headaches, rather than resolving them, with users reporting fragmented or glitchy performance and a host of unexpected failures. One of the root causes of this is that VDI generally isn’t brought in to enhance the user experience, but to make life easier for IT.
Short-term savings = long-term pain
Our latest research on the Death and Rebirth of the Service Desk found that, while 92% of IT frontline workers say the employee experience is an important consideration when choosing a VDI solution, the exact same number admit that it has primarily been designed to make life easier for IT, rather than the end-user. Furthermore, 91% say that cost considerations trump performance when choosing a provider.
The consequences of these decisions is that, while organizations are saving money on the initial purchasing and setup of VDI, they are running up huge maintenance costs due to on-going need for specialist support. Currently a third (31%) of all businesses say they are encountering daily VDI issues that require L3 VDI specialist support, while a further 40% report such complications at least once a week, as L1 and L2 support are often lack the skills to diagnose and fix VDI performance issues.
Any issues? Just blame the VDI
Frustrations over these on-going VDI costs are compounded by the fact that a significant proportion of these escalated issues were not necessarily related to VDI at all. Our report shows that application functionality failures (54%) and slow performance (47%) accounted for two of the top three most reported issues to IT teams – the former being nothing to do with VDI and the latter only occasionally so.
Part of the reason that this happens is that delivering a desktop is only one part of making VDI work. For VDI to be effective, users also need seamless access to dozens of applications and data assets. However, when businesses have zero visibility about whether these integrations are working, they tend to simply blame VDI rather than address root causes.
Nexthink VDI helps eliminate these issues by enabling businesses to take control of the entire user experience. By providing targeted alerts and AI-powered analytics, Nexthink allows IT teams to stay ahead of employee frustrations, while avoiding the blame game between functions.
Read our latest report to find out more about the challenges of VDI management, or to see a demo of our upcoming VDI platform capabilities live on stage at Experience, visit the Experience Replays site and check out the keynote from our CEO and Founder, Pedro Bados and CPO, Sam Gantner.
