Virtualizing the Enterprise: The Virtual Mobile Desktop

Breaking the tight coupling between the desktop as application delivery channel and desktop as physical hardware is the essence of desktop virtualization. Over the last few years, organizations had great ambitions to deploy the technology. Those ambitions have been tempered by the experiences of the early adopters. Though fewer organizations are using virtual desktops than anticipated, those that have adopted it are expanding its use. Support of remote, mobile users is a critical, emerging use case for virtual desktops, which provide access to non-mobile-enabled applications. Organizations are making use of a broadening set of desktop virtualization architectures that differ dramatically from classic virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI): 1.) Where VDI runs desktops workloads in the data center, IT is also running them locally, hosted on another operating system; 2.) Running them on PCs equipped with their own bare-metal hypervisors; 3.) Using a single physical PC to serve many users at once. Most significantly, IT is already beginning to adopt “Desktops as a Service” models that shift the workloads out to a cloud provider. These options help IT address more use cases and users with appropriate solutions, helping to build more flexible business cases for deployment. Building a simple ROI business case can be challenging, but IT keeps its focus on the soft-cost benefits of improved management and security for the most part.