Virtual Desktops

Devices today are often high spec and easily upgraded. Keeping up with this speed of development is a costly and time-consuming process for employers who don’t support a BYOD environment. It now makes sense to allow employees to work on devices that they are familiar with and can upgrade as and when they need or want to and not just use equipment supplied to them.

This is where your VDI environment comes into play. Being able to work more efficiently in the office and more mobile out of the office, it allows employees to access the information and applications they need from any location.

A virtualised desktop accessed on a range of devices – as opposed to static PCs – supports fluid workflows and a more versatile approach to any number of tasks.

With the GDPR regulations enforced in 2018, hosting solutions that allow a flexible working environment whilst maintaining security are a business priority.

With cloud-hosted desktops, lost or compromised hardware no longer poses the same security threat, as company data is not stored on your device.

This extra layer of protection ensures that critical data is only stored inside the data centre, where it can be more easily managed, protected, and recovered. 

If users do not have access to a centrally hosted desktop, they are often tempted to use a third-party cloud storage service to transfer their data or carry data on storage devices between home and office. Both solutions’ present risks. Physical storage can lead to loss or theft, and unknown and unapproved third-party storage services are beyond your control.

Organisations with cloud-hosted desktops will often find that their IT admin headache is significantly reduced, and IT agility improved.

On a VDI, changes can be made to the central server instead of each user’s device. By making a single image update that will instantly apply to all of the users’ machines within that network, the burden on IT is reduced. The same principle applies to all patch maintenance and software updates.

The agility of IT operations can be further improved by the speed with which a VDI allows businesses to change the specifications of the environment. Organisations that suddenly find themselves with a heavy network load, are able to scale your resources up and down without heavy investment in hardware.

Any hosted solution you invest in must provide a greater level of security reassurance than your current solution.

Our VDI solution allows you to store all business-critical information centrally in a secure location. No data is stored on user-owned devices so breaches cannot result from loss or theft.

As important, is the location your data is stored in. The invalidation of Safe Harbour in 2015 highlighted the comparative weakness of data privacy regulation in places like the United States. Hosting your desktop solution with a company whose datacentres are 100% UK-based means that your data will never leave the UK and will be stored in a facility you can be sure meets the highest data protection standards.

A key factor for businesses looking to implement a virtual desktop environment is in finding out the comparison between Capital Expenditure of traditional desktop solutions versus the Operational Expense of cloud-hosted desktops.

Unlike the company-wide purchase and maintenance of physical desktop machines, cloud hosted desktops provide much more manageable and standardised OpEx.

The infrastructure requirements of VDI’s do not demand a great deal of initial investment aside from some setup and migration charges. Now, the investment into the new infrastructure is spread across much smaller monthly payments which generally also includes maintenance of the equipment used.