Small and medium businesses face an array of pressing challenges as they strive to succeed in today’s increasingly global business environment. To compete with large corporations, mid-size organizations must maximize business agility to create innovative solutions and capture new market opportunities rapidly. To attract and retain customers, they need to stay focused on responding to customer needs, creating customer value, and developing customer-centric strategies for expanding the business. At the same time, mid-size organization must optimize internal efficiencies; improve employee productivity while reducing operational costs so they remain competitive.
When applied strategically, technology can be a secret weapon for helping smaller organizations be more agile and flexible than their larger competitors helping them gain “first-mover” advantages. From law firms, regional banks, and specialized manufacturing companies to K–12 schools and healthcare service providers, a wide variety of public and private sector organizations are considering the potential for desktop virtualization to increase employee productivity, create new flexible work models, enhance security, simplify and streamline desktop management and IT support operations. In short, by making the organization and its employee more efficient, desktop virtualization can enable an organization to react quicker and move faster to meet the needs of customers.
This all sounds great – but are there any hidden "gotchas" behind all this?
Desktop virtualization can provide significant benefits, but mid-size organization should take the time to conduct due diligence before embarking on a desktop virtualization project—or any technology project for that matter. Doing a detailed pro and con analysis is warranted, and Dell recommends consideration be given to following areas:
- Organizational priorities and objectives – define organizational, business and IT objectives for end-user computing and user productivity, and are prepared to measure progress against those objectives.
- IT complexity – Deploying, managing, and supporting a desktop virtualization solution can be a complex undertaking, especially for a small IT group.
- Employees and applications – Attempts to change employee's workspace can trigger strong reactions. Employees often use applications not supported by the corporate IT group to get their work done. Organizations should carefully assess and map users and their applications to use cases to gain a complete and full picture of how users are using computing systems.
- Costs – While mid-size organizations may not be averse to increasing IT spending, they need to make sure they are spending wisely on projects that will deliver the greatest results. Clearly understanding operational and capital costs and existing resources can help an organization make the most efficient and effective use of a virtualization project budget.
- Deployment considerations – To help ensure accurate sizing of a solution, organizations should assess desktop workloads to determine which desktops and applications should—or should not—be virtualized.
- Security – organizations should have in place a clear security strategy that defines user access policies and the approaches for protecting corporate and customer data. Desktop virtualization can help close security gaps and contribute to regulatory compliance.
After identifying the goals, strategies, and potential challenges of a desktop virtualization project, organizations must find a desktop virtualization solution that can address their specific needs. The solution must maximize the benefits of desktop virtualization while minimizing the time, costs, and resources required for deploying and managing it. Dell now offers an integrated, simple plug-and-play appliance designed to help mid-size organizations realize the benefits of desktop virtualization while avoiding high costs and complex time-consuming deployments. Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions Simplified brings together an enterprise-class Dell PowerEdge server and Citrix VDI-in-a-Box virtualization software to help organizations rapidly deploy and easily manage appliance-based desktop virtualization.
Many small and medium businesses and public sector organizations are investigating desktop virtualization as a way to accelerate the velocity of their organization’s goal attainment and beat the “big guys”. Before embarking on the journey to desktop virtualization, organizations will benefit from a thorough business and technical assessment of the pros and cons of desktop virtualization.
For more information about the Dell DVS Simplified solution, contact your Dell representative or visit: Dell.com/dvssimplified.
