Technology is ever changing, but there is one thing that history has proven and that business users will always need an EUC (End-User Computing) endpoint to run their business applications. Desktop options for enterprises has evolved over time, and so doing your research and understanding them all is an important element to make the right choice(s) for your enterprise. Today we have many to consider – for this series of articles we will focus on the following – physical desktops, VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), RDSH (Remote Desktop Session Host), thin clients, DaaS (Desktops as a Service). Also consider the fact that millions of user endpoints are sold annually, leaving enterprises with tough decisions to be made. Today let’s uncover the future of the windows desktop, and what your enterprise needs to understand in order to make good decisions about its endpoint deployment.
Let’s take a poll
If I ask you what the future of the windows desktop is, and your choices are virtualized VDI on-premises, traditional physical endpoints (laptops, desktop, thin clients, tablets, etc) or DaaS. What would your answer be? Often-times when I ask customers this question most will respond with DaaS. Regardless of how you answered make a note of your opinion for now.
What is the future of the windows desktop in your enterprise?
There are a few major factors for consideration when determining which endpoints will best for your environment. The first consider security and how locked down the endpoint needs to be, next what the end-user needs to be able to do their job successfully and ensuring that endpoint solutions be selected through collaboration and input with key business users. Let’s break this down further to demonstrate what I mean by looking at a financial industry environment and my experiences with their desktop use cases next.
Endpoint Business Use Case Considerations
Each financial organization is different, but let’s take what could be expected in a typical investment company. Endpoints will be leveraged by business users, information technology staff, executives, investors. As we start thinking about what each of these types of individuals needs to do their jobs it will be different, and the closer we get to the investor the more likely security will be a larger factor for protecting confidential data overall. In its most basic form, let’s take a closer look at what we could recommend be deployed in this scenario.
- Business Users – physical desktop for daily activities, locked down and not a PC administrator
- Information Technology Staff – laptop for daily activities, and the ability to install software
- Executives – likely will be similar the business users from a security perspective, but may have special requirements or additional devices such as tablets to accommodate their individual needs
- Investors – Thin clients with multiple monitors to watch activities closely with internet access
In this scenario, we haven’t even touched on anything more than the physical endpoint. What about EUC technologies such as RDSH, VDI, and DaaS?
More to come
Stay tuned for Part 2 of the future of the windows desktop article series. When we discuss this topic further, we will look at how business challenges can also have a impact on what you really deploy, and in a cloud-first world where does this fit into endpoint deployment. Also looking at the pros and cons of using the various EUC technologies such as RDSH, VDI and DaaS. Watch for this post soon!
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