According to a new report by a technology research firm, the global hosted desktop market will grow at a 65.7% compound annual growth rate between 2012 and 2016.
The report identifies financial pressures (“the increasing need to reduce desktop infrastructure costs”) as one of the principal causes of this growth. Aside from cost-efficiency, anywhere-availability and heavy-duty IT security are also characteristics of hosted desktops that are commonly cited by journalists and industry leaders as motivations for the hosted desktop market’s explosive growth.
For example, hosted virtual desktops are under consideration (in the form of a 7,500-user pilot deployment) by the United States Navy as a cost-saving measure that “offers the additional benefit of an improved network user experience.” Hosted virtual desktops provide “centralized security patching and updating” and “increased security achieved by establishing a secure, non-persistent operating environment,” according to the Navy.
Hertz Rent-a-Car, a Pennsylvania school district, and a state government agency in Iowa, on the other hand, have already been able to benefit from hosted desktops, according to a blog post on CIO.com by VMware. By switching to desktop virtualization, Hertz more than doubled the lifespan of its desktops, the school district was able to add new technologies to its art and music departments rather than simply replenishing its supply of PCs, and the Iowa government agency decreased its IT costs by $6.5 million. In a separate article, an Ohio school district IT director also praised desktop virtualization as being capable of extending the lifecycle of old PCs by instilling them with “new hardware speed.”
In contrast, Michael Endler of InformationWeek stresses mobility as the most attractive aspect of hosted desktops to businesses; Endler even quotes Forrester analyst David Johnson as arguing, “The number-one driver for VDI has shifted from cost savings to supporting the ability to work from anywhere. More companies are investing for a flexible work style.” With hosted desktops, employees can access their files and applications from anywhere and with any Internet-connected device (including desktops, laptops, thin clients, tablets, and smartphones). Despite the greater mobility and wider availability of hosted desktops, however, a virtual desktop infrastructure has the potential to be even more centralized and standardized than an on-site IT infrastructure—a point highlighted by Endler when he mentions that hosted desktops would allow a business with a Windows XP infrastructure to use whatever computers it wanted (i.e., computers running Windows 7, Windows 8, Mac OS, or Linux) as workstations.
Unmentioned in these articles about the appeal of desktop virtualization is how easy it is to switch to hosted desktop—that all businesses have to do to switch to accomplish this is sign up for Desktop Hosting from IronOrbit. From there, IronOrbit will design the solution based upon the business’s requirements and preferences; deploy the solution; perform whatever data migration the situation calls for; continually maintain and monitor the infrastructure of the solution; and supplement the Hosted Desktop Solution with 24x7x365 technical support, comprehensive Orbital Security, and managed data backups. The upfront costs of IronOrbit are minimal, too (they’ll only owe us small setup and migration fees and the first of their low, flat monthly payments). Our hosted desktops aren’t just fully-supported and cost-effective, however; they also perform and scale better than any other version available (they were designed and built in collaboration with the Citrix VDI-in-a-Box development team). For more information or to commence a free 30-day trial of any of our hosted solutions, businesses should contact an IronOrbit sales representative today.