VDI’s Role in the Evolving Business Landscape in 2023

The business landscape in the UK has undergone dramatic changes in recent years. Organisations have been navigating ways to save costs while meeting employees' evolving demands, from brick-and-mortar operations to fully online and hybrid settings. 2023, which started with economic uncertainty, is likely to tighten business costs. It is now more important than ever to ensure that businesses have a tech stack that is cost-effective, scalable, and simple.

There is no denying that employee expectations have shaped business strategies and made hybrid working an integral part of the working culture. And, given the exponential growth of digitalisation, this appears to be the case in the future. Cloud and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) technologies have enabled organisations to facilitate their operations remotely, regardless of geographical location. In today's competitive landscape, businesses must ensure that they can provide a better experience to their employees without jeopardising the security of their digital assets.

The Year of VDI

The market is becoming increasingly competitive every day and organisations that deploy appropriate technologies will have a competitive advantage in their growth. According to recent research, the global Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Market size was approximately $12.65 Billion in 2022 and is expected to reach an estimated $33.42 Billion by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate of 19.4%.

The COVID-19 outbreak and the current economic crisis have impacted many sectors around the world. The virtual desktop infrastructure market is no exception to this rule. To slow the spread, governments around the world implemented strict measures such as lockdowns, border closures, and social distancing procedures. These changes had a significant impact on the global workforce. And necessity is the mother of invention, or in this case, adoption. Since 2005, the number of remote workers has increased by 140%. That is ten times faster than the rest of the workforce. VDI enables the 66% of companies that provide this to their employees to do so in a relatively simple manner.

Many of the top VDI benefits originally touted during COVID remain important reasons IT departments rely on VDI, whether on-premise or, more likely these days, hosted in the cloud. First and foremost, it simplifies IT management. Perhaps the most significant advantage of VDI is that everything is managed in a single location. When new versions of applications are released, they can be added to a centralised desktop image rather than being installed and then maintained on tens of thousands of end-user devices. It's also simple to onboard new employees. IT administrators simply deploy the base image of what their desktops should look like. This saves valuable desktop management time and quickly returns the user to productivity.

VDI can help businesses become more agile. Organisations can quickly set up new Virtual Machines for development and testing, as well as for seasonal workers and contractors. It also allows employees to work more flexibly. They can access VDI using their preferred device as long as they have internet access. With 67% of employees using personal devices at work, this is advantageous for companies that support BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). The user experience is the same whether they use a smartphone, laptop, iOS, or Windows.

Common Pitfalls

Nothing derails a VDI project faster than a failure to provide a great user experience. VDI projects fail when organisations do not understand the needs of their end-user. Communication and expectation management is critical. Responsive desktops and applications are important, but they should not be the only consideration. Login time, for example, is a performance metric with high visibility and impact in healthcare settings where clinicians move from location to location. Organisations must also recognise the importance of predictability. User satisfaction will suffer if a VDI service consistently provides excellent performance but occasionally experiences unexpected slowdowns.

Administrative experience is also important in determining overall satisfaction with a VDI solution. If the governance is complicated, developers are more likely to make errors that affect users and cause delays. A variety of factors contribute to the complexity of a VDI project. Meeting stringent feature and performance requirements is important, as is addressing availability and security concerns. Maintaining a large VDI environment requires a significant amount of planning, testing, and monitoring.

Architecting a solution that will scale as an organisation grows adds complexity, and there are significant risks associated with making a mistake in the design. A VDI environment that is under-specified causes major headaches later, while a design that is over-specified increases upfront costs. It can be difficult to balance bandwidth and capacity requirements across servers, storage systems, and networks, and multiple tools are required to manage and monitor the various resource silos.

Key Considerations When Deploying

VDI security encompasses the technologies and best practices employed to secure virtual desktops.

While VDI enhances mobility and remote access to mission-critical applications, it also raises serious security concerns. An insecure device, stolen password or compromised user desktop session can easily expose an organization to ransomware, malware, insider threats and network sniffing.

Securing a virtualised environment requires more than cutting-edge tools. Best practices can go a long way toward safeguarding mission-critical systems and confidential data. One step is setting controls to disable a device in local mode if it is not synchronised within a predetermined time interval. This allows companies to stay ahead of hackers on the lookout for new ways to outsmart security protocols.

Furthermore, preventing unauthorised access by establishing stringent policy-driven access controls for desktops and apps across corporate and employee-owned devices and quarantining intrusions with micro-segmentation so that they don’t spread across the network, assist in hiking security efforts. Additionally, organisations looking to deploy VDI must protect data by leveraging built-in encryption capabilities, data-at-rest encryption and distributed firewall support. Finally, investing in employee training to minimise data leakage is critical, as individuals are often the weakest point in cybersecurity.

Fool-proof VDI

The growing adoption of hybrid, multi-cloud, and hyper-convergence environments is changing virtualisation in complex ways, putting security professionals on the edge. Virtualisation has altered the way data centres operate, forcing the upgrade of legacy systems and pushing organisations toward more scalable and robust infrastructure deployments. Companies will require security solutions that detect and prevent complex malware while consuming fewer resources and bandwidth as more everyday transactions become technology-based and work from home becomes more common. Because of the lack of centralised control or enforceable standards, this upends traditional security practices. Effective VDI solutions will set the tone for the entire IT industry.