Forbes Councils Member and Workspot Vice President, Strategic Partnerships
Forbes Business Development Council
COUNCIL POST| Membership (Fee-Based)
Oct 25, 2022,07:30am EDT
Having spent a bit over a year learning about the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) space, in this article, I will discuss the history of VDI as well as three trends the C-suite should account for in its budget allocation.
Let’s dig into a bit of the history.
As the original Citrix offering, VDI had a single server which consisted of MS OS2 hosting multiple Win16 sessions managed through one remote control software providing a remote desktop. Eventually, remote applications became a key requirement for customers who wanted to eliminate the “desktop within a desktop” issue, allowing them to “publish” their apps into their local desktops.
Security became more important as the market evolved. That’s when a conditional access solution was introduced based on VPN technology. All in all, the idea was to have end-to-end control with the exception of the actual physical network, with access enabled from any device or application that runs on Windows OS or HTML browser.
This is still the way customers are doing it today: DIY VDI customers own management, component choice, configuration and maintenance. Cloud requirements came next.
What were the effects of this change?
To put the technical jargon above in perspective, consider all of the things in our lives that transformed from a physical asset to a subscription model. The music industry transformed from vinyls, tapes and CDs to being made available through streaming on any device. Books and the publishing industry transformed from utilizing bookstores to providing content through streaming devices and as audiobooks.
Similar transformations occurred in the business world, such as with Siebel being taken out by Salesforce. The true SaaS consumption model now leads the market: Scenarios in which consumers pay for what they actually use, with the responsibility of ownership and maintenance owned by their provider rather than them as consumers.
Cloud computing is a massive and growing market transforming how we work. Imagine working on your laptop just as easily as streaming Netflix. Yet rather than spending thousands of dollars on a powerful PC and waiting months for it to arrive due to supply chain issues, with a cloud PC configured, you can immediately start designing, uploading and editing high-quality videos anywhere in the world on any device.
Amitabh Sinha predicted this shift 10+ years ago when he started my company Workspot. Both Workspot partners, AWS introduced Workspaces in late 2013, and Microsoft introduced a cloud PC offering by unveiling Windows 365 in 2021.
As more options become available, it no longer seems a matter of “when” such solutions will be available. Here are three trends leading the way in VDI to cloud PC transformation.
1. DIY VDI is dying, if not already dead—cloud PC is now leading the way.
DIY VDI revenue unit economics over the last six years show single digits coming from existing customers who are dreading the lift and shift. Legacy VDI solutions have been acquired. Citrix was acquired by Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital, while VMWare was acquired by Broadcom.
Prices are expected to go up, restructure is inevitable and innovation will be lacking. It’s a perfect market opportunity for customers to challenge existing cloud vendors and cloud PC solutions to innovate and add business value.
Single panes of glass for hardware devices and Cloud PC provide IT departments the flexibility to manage devices remotely and add bring-your-own-device (BOYD) while maintaining security. This is an inevitable transformation that needs to be implemented as soon as possible.
With the “Great Resignation,” just consider how many devices are surely out there containing confidential and proprietary information that haven’t been returned to IT. With the pandemic came supply chain issues causing semiconductor shortages. A recent study from Bain & Company predicts that even though we might see some relief, the actual resolution might not take place until 2024. The DIY process requires all of the devices to be shipped to IT to be managed, provisioned and maintained, causing inevitable onboarding delays, reduced productivity and constraints to hiring talent.
Google, also a Workspot partner, has an opportunity to challenge the market by transforming Chromebooks from education-friendly devices to being marketed as the most secure enterprise and cloud-ready options available now. Adding cloud PC on top of ChromeOS provides one single pane of glass for hardware and software management.
2. Users should educate themselves on multicloud and hybrid requirements.
With the acquisitions, two cloud solutions are challenging the market with their own native solutions. Microsoft is offering Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Windows 365 and locks in the competition by requiring VDA and office virtualization fees.
AWS Worskpaces has been in the market for quite some time and is battling Microsoft fees by bundling them into its offering.
Google Cloud chooses a partner-first strategy, allowing its customers to choose which solution they would like to implement. In a recent survey of 1,000 IT decision makers across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, 90% of respondents claimed a multicloud strategy is working for their enterprises.
Many organizations still have on-prem data centers; migration to the cloud is an investment that requires time. That’s why a flexible multicloud solution with hybrid capabilities to support both cloud and on-prem requirements will be key.
3. Security and ransomware mitigation are IT essentials.
Cloud PC provides IT with central security control. Multicloud management offers quick disaster recovery; however, ransomware is a beast of its own, and it should be top of mind for every C-level executive.
According to Sophos’ State of Ransomware study, 66% of organizations were hit by ransomware in the last year, up from 37% in 2020. The highest average ransom payments were $2.04 million in manufacturing and production. It can take up to a month for a company to recover. An isolated compute environment is an innovative mitigation strategy that can be implemented with a cloud PC solution.
What’s next in VDI?
We should continue to see innovation as the customers begin to make plans to replace their DIY VDI solutions and refresh budget allocations with new scalable options.
See the Original Article on: Forbes.com