For centuries we’ve had something in common with one another, from the Ming Dynasty to the British Royals, from homemakers to high powered executives on Wall St we’ve organised, created, collaborated and commanded from a desk found in most homes, offices, castles and military bases since we graduated from the stone ages. The desktop, a place where you know you’ll find your pen and paper, your intray, your letters, your life. It’s a part of our evolution.
Technology of course typically emulates our real life behaviours and for the past 25-30 years we’ve not only maintained our traditional desks but the desktop of the modern computer has played a significant role in how we organise our work and personal lives. Whether you’re a Mac or a PC user you keep the tools you use such as email, documents and applications right there on your desktop where it can be found and used at your leisure and for many years this has been the status quo.
But something is amiss.Through two emergent behaviours in technology - mobile Internet and mobile smartphones and tablets we now have a tendency to sprawl our lives across many different platforms away from the home or office. Of course some of us still remain true to the traditional desktop but now with the ability to “work from anywhere” the old desktop is losing favour for iPad’s, home computers that have access to work resources and smart phones such as the Blackberry.
Surely this can’t be a bad thing. With access to email and the “cloud” from any device perhaps after many centuries of human organisational behaviour we’ve evolved and we simply don’t need our old desktops anymore?
I’d be inclined to agree if I didn’t see an all too common scene at the airport last week, a traveller who had a Blackberry, an iPad and a Windows PC and he was alternating between these three devices using each one as a tool to access a certain app or document that couldn’t be found on the other. So far we’ve managed to come in mobility but yet how disorganised our behaviour has become that we need to routinely switch between devices in order to organise, create, collaborate and command. Why?
With increasing competition in the market between the old school traditional Microsoft based desktop products and newer mobile technologies and work-ready home computers we have so much choice but still very little integration between these newer platforms. What’s more, these devices don’t follow a traditional desktop look and feel but rather their own slant on how we should organise our lives. This is fine assuming you stick to one platform and one device and get efficient in that particular technology, but as we all appear to be exploring these new technologies both in our work and personal lives it isn’t as easy as that and the frightening reality is that through attempting to mobilise and make life easier for workers and themselves, organisation’s are actually becoming less productive because the new technologies don’t quite fit together as well the old ones.
Enter the Virtual Desktop
In what has seemed like a stop and start technology over the past few years, virtual desktops are rapidly becoming the answer to the technology sprawl we’re experiencing in mobility today.
While most technology platforms have differing ways of displaying and organising your information, they all have one thing in common today – Internet connectivity. And, with Internet connectivity virtually everywhere in the world we now have the ability to choose the services we connect to. Through this ability vendors such as Citrix and VMWare (two leading virtualisation company’s) have developed VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) which allows your organisation to choose first of all what type of basic desktop layout you’ll use (e.g. Mac, PC or Linux) but then what applications your people will use. Once this basic framework is in place it’s a matter of then choosing where these “virtual” desktops will be stored. Most commonly these then reside on your company server system or in a private cloud infrastructure.
How would this help our ambidextrous chap at the airport? Well, for one thing he could still choose to work from a PC, an iPad a Blackberry or even one the Kiosk terminals at the airport but instead of having to adapt to different layouts and operating systems he could simply load his work desktop up over the Internet using most mainstream web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox.
Technologies like this have stalled over the years largely due to costs of infrastructure and Internet connectivity speeds but with a rapidly evolving cloud industry and the ability to scale up Internet speeds in most countries I believe firmly that the Virtual Desktop is here to stay.
While everyone’s circumstances differ, here’s a couple of reason’s why I’d be recommending VDI for organisations today:
1. True Mobile Worker. Not only access from anywhere, but access everything you use at your office from anywhere, this could include accounting applications, design tools, productivity tools and of course documents and email. No need to race back to the office to access applications that can’t be used on your mobile devices.
2. Completely centralised organisation data – reduce the need for employees to save sensitive company information on other devices or on work laptops that could be stolen or misplaced potentially falling into the wrong hands.
3. BYO devices. Once you’ve chosen your desired platform be it Windows, MacOS or perhaps the lesser known Redhat or Ubuntu you can encourage flexibility for people to use whatever device they’re comfortable with. So long as they’re productive and using the software tools you’ve invested in. Who cares if your employee really loves Android Tablets? – so long as he or she can access the Virtual Desktop it makes little difference to you.
4. Reduced desktop hardware investment. With all of your desktops “virtualised” into a single server or a server farm there is less emphasis on high performing desktops and more emphasis on supporting and managing the “core” infrastructure. Virtual desktops don’t require the end users to have the latest and greatest because most of the processing work is done by the virtual server back at your office or in the data center. In many cases using a virtual infrastructure can mean older desktops are brought back to life because they’re simply used as a gateway to the desktop stored elsewhere on a more powerful machine.
5. Centralised support. Rather than your IT support or IT department providing support for scores of devices potentially distributed across borders or across the world, instead your IT is focused on the core infrastructure, desktops are backed up in a single location and if a worker’s computer dies all they need is to get access to any other computer with an Internet connection – which, as discussed means virtually any computer you can find.
Whilst technologies such as VDI have existed for some years it is rapidly gaining credibility in the enterprise for the compelling reasons above. For those who wish to provide the flexibility of devices whilst also limiting the security risks and support challenges of the current IT environment then I’d say if you’re not looking at Virtual Desktops you’re virtually crazy!
