Desktop Virtualization Journal

Virtualization at Cloud Expo

Cloud Computing Expo - Times of economic woe, such as we find ourselves in now, require organizations to think outside of the box in order to survive. This typically involves searching for new and creative ways to streamline business processes, reduce overhead and maintain sales despite decreased demand. However, more companies are realizing the potential of investing in new and emerging technologies as a tactical survival strategy than ever before. This begs the question of why? After all, when cuts are being made across the board, shouldn't the IT department feel the heat as well?

The answer to these questions is found in the fact that many of today's emerging technologies, such as endpoint virtualization, come with a promise. That promise is that they will provide the ability to do more with less. This is a pledge that is hard to pass up, particularly when it could mean the difference between safely navigating through this economic storm and being swallowed up by it.

Endpoint virtualization is not the only technological innovation that carries this promise with it, but it certainly is one of the most interesting. Examples of endpoint virtualization range from application virtualization and streaming to desktop virtualization, and though it seems like a rather broad category of technologies, it really is quite novel at its core. Consider that virtualization in general is simply the separation of one system from another, one software application from another, one bit of information from another. A virtualized system is one that thinks it has hardware underneath, but what is actually down there is just more software. On the endpoint, this means separating the end-user experience, that which is most important to creating business value, from the underlying device.

This makes the primary goal of endpoint virtualization increased end user productivity - regardless of equipment, connectivity or location - and since end users are really where the rubber meets the road, this enhanced productivity equals real cost savings. In addition, endpoint virtualization provides IT departments with the ability to reduce maintenance costs through optimization, simplification and automation. Therefore, modular endpoint virtualization implementation can create significant savings very quickly, both in recovering lost user productivity and in hard IT costs.

Here are just five examples of areas in which endpoint virtualization can help reduce costs:

1. Workspace Delivery
Most of today's employees have a preference when it comes to which operating system they use and on what platform it sits. As such, many users have one device they use for personal computing and another they use for work. The result is that users are often required to use a platform for work that they are less familiar with and therefore less productive on. Endpoint virtualization allows users to safely and securely use whichever platform they feel they are most productive on, while at the same time not creating major issues for the IT department.

Without endpoint virtualization this simply would not be a feasible method of increasing user productivity. Deploying workspaces to such a vast and varied array of devices without endpoint virtualization would simply take too much time and resources to install an image on each device and then test all those applications and tools to make sure they are functioning properly and not conflicting with anything already loaded on each individual machine.

2. Workspace Roaming
In some industries, such as retail, manufacturing and health care, employees are anything but stationary. Their work demands that they move from one location to another, all the while needing access to not only a consistent portfolio of applications, but ideally their own complete workspace - their desktop, their programs and their files. Endpoint virtualization can satisfy this need by delivering a reliable, consistent and secure user experience regardless of the underlying device or the location of that device. The resulting benefit is faster service times when dealing with customers or patients, and in turn, reduced costs as less time and effort is required on the part of the user to effectively serve each individual patron.

3. License Management
Tracking license compliance and re-harvesting unused licenses can be a significant drain on IT resources, and allowing unused licenses to sit idle can be even more costly. Endpoint virtualization, in addition to providing all the benefits of virtualization, can also give IT the ability to centrally manage and dynamically track licenses and ensure license compliance. It also provides the capability to automate re-harvesting in order to optimize license costs, making best use of end-user license agreement (EULA) terms. Components of endpoint virtualization systems like application streaming can be quickly and easily implemented to recover the lost asset value around even a single costly application, sometimes delivering an immediate return on the cost of the system.

4. User Downtime Due to Application Conflicts
By using endpoint virtualization to virtualize applications, those applications are isolated both from other programs and from the underlying operating system. Thus, endpoint virtualization eliminates the need for pre-deployment testing, and the processes associated with application deployment, version changes, and updates are significantly accelerated. All of this equates to improved application maintenance, reduced supporting costs, and also increased user productivity due to less downtime waiting for IT to update applications and solve conflicts.

5. User Downtime Due to Application Recovery
Occasionally, an application crashes despite being isolated from the rest of the system due to an outside cause, for example, a Web browser that encounters an issue while being used to do research online. With endpoint virtualization, that Web browser can be virtualized so that the problem that application encounters will not affect the rest of the system. In addition, the program can simply be reset and returned to the normal operating state without having to be reloaded. This can even be done by the user, allowing instant, self-rectification - avoiding a help desk call and allowing them to continue working nearly as if nothing had happened.

By separating the information that truly matters, the user experience, from the underlying commodity computing environment, endpoint virtualization has the ability to help organizations reduce costs by increasing user productivity and by allowing the IT staff to focus on protecting completely, managing easily, and controlling automatically. In addition, many endpoint virtualization solutions can be purchased and implemented modularly, eliminating the need for a forklift overhaul of the entire IT infrastructure - allowing organizations to evolve their IT management gradually, avoiding unnecessary upfront investments and capitalizing on savings at each step.