Operational costs of VDI outweigh promised benefits, say IT workers

Nexthink announces 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.