Traditional approaches to business remain in flux. This is evidenced by the continued shift towards remote and hybrid working methodologies that allow organisations to better leverage talent, gain access to new markets, and reduce costs. It is also, according to a recent Forrester Total Economic Impact survey, the reason why many companies are adjusting their technology investments, moving towards cloud-based solutions such as Azure Virtual Desktop to save time, costs and improve productivity. Companies need solutions that allow them to embed flexibility within the very core of their technology stack so they can spin up virtual instances, manage user access, and connect and collaborate seamlessly – and all within the cloud. The same survey found that most companies expect the use of virtualised desktops to increase by up to 61% by 2026, with cloud-based solutions (60%) the most popular due to the fact they are easier to manage, have better security and are more accessible for remote and hybrid teams.
In short, they want to move away from the complexity that’s traditionally surrounded building a virtual environment on-prem, and towards a platform that allows them to simply build environments and present them to clients without having to worry about how connections are established or what components are required. Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) provides organisations with this flexibility and speed. For example, it can spin up a call centre for 50 people within a matter of moments without waiting on 50 machines – anyone can access these machines from anywhere in the world within an environment that’s secure and stable. This is an invaluable asset, and it is one that has a proven return on investment (ROI).
The Forrester study found that by moving to AVD, users cut their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) licensing and IT infrastructure costs by as much as 34% a year with a saving on IT maintenance and deployment of 59%. Productivity increased by 22 person hours per end user while security was 96% faster. ROI tapped in at an impressive 210%.
The technology allows organisations to present a complete desktop experience to users with bespoke business applications served directly to each user, on demand. Each virtual machine is aligned with your organisation’s security standards from the outset and access can be customised per user. This then allows for improved access control and flexibility for IT teams to allocate machines on demand, and it opens up to scale – any machine can be spun up or down based on demand and is only paid for when they are in use.
The latter is, of course, a significant saving as the infrastructure required to manage each desktop and environment is no longer based on premises. Instead, organisations can have as few as 400 virtual machines per host pool. It is recommended to have no more than 5 000 machines per host pool, each one spinning up when the others get busy. The cost of hardware is cut down to the bare metallic bones while employees work as if they are carrying their desktops with them all around the world.
Another significant benefit is the lack of maintenance. Virtual means immediate and secure support through integration with the Azure platform and ongoing application updates, vulnerability patches and security visibility. Systems don’t age, don’t run in a lifecycle, and don’t demand constant replenishment or asset sweating as they are always the most up-to-date and modernised version available. In itself, this is an exceptional cost and time saving that plays out over both the long and the short term. It is bolstered by rich visibility into system and virtual machine performance with reporting features that allow for the business to drill down into user profiles and productivity.
The company can then curate machines based on actual usage, reducing spend on unnecessary applications while providing users with exactly the right tools they need to fulfil their roles. Using the data provided by the system, companies can assess trends in working, application relevance, productivity and capacity to make more informed decisions around expenditure and use cases.
Finally, AVD provides the business with much-needed consistency. At a time when everything from the economy to electricity to geopolitical instability is the very definition of inconsistency, companies can rely on this technology to deliver exactly the right level of functionality at the right time.