Trend

Desktop virtualization picks up steam

The technology is helping enterprises in fast and easy provisioning of new desktops at short notice. Abhinav Singh says that this market is expected to pick-up with BFSI and the BPO leading the way

There has been traction towards desktop virtualization by large enterprises in India. They have tried everything to reduce desktop management costs including outsourcing of desktop management, automated help desks, and remote service technologies, but the costs of managing desktops refuse to come down. As per Gartner estimates, PC architectures enable the greatest degree of flexibility in terms of application diversity, configuration options and degrees of manageability and this flexibility comes with a cost, because the TCO for PCs can range between $4,000 and $9,000 (or more) per user per year at the global level. Indian companies are facing a crunch when it comes to desktop manageability and are looking at desktop virtualization to trim costs. Ganesh Mahabala, Regional Director -India & SAARC, VMware, said, “The BPO and banking segments have generated special interest as they access sensitive customer data on their desktops. Maintaining endpoint security is an area of concern for them. It is a fact that simplified desktop operations result in lowering costs significantly, reducing the risk of data loss and fast, reliable desktop delivery to office workers at any location.”

Organizations are leveraging the power of desktop virtualization. Some large BPO companies in India who were facing challenges in terms of underutilized desktops and high maintenance costs have been able to save significantly on per agent per year costs by deploying desktop virtualization. Moreover desktop virtualization has facilitated BPO agents to work from any PC in any office. At the same time, BPO companies have the flexibility of shifting processes and agents across desktops, offices and even cities at short notice. BPOs also have the flexibility to deliver services from secondary sites in case of any disaster at a primary site and vice versa, giving them the flexibility of delivering services from multiple locations, adding value to their operational risk management strategies. Desktop virtualization has also increased PC utilization for many companies in India as the same PC can be used across multiple shifts, agents and processes. Additionally all application rights and user permissions to the applications are maintained centrally thereby improving the overall security of application access by users. Express Computer got further insights about how desktop virtualization is expected to become popular in the Indian market in the future and what is going to drive this market.

Early stages of adoption

As mentioned enterprises in India are increasingly exploring alternative approaches to traditional desktop management. Doug Hauger, Chief Operating Officer, Microsoft India explained, “For many IT professionals within large Indian organizations, maintaining control over their desktop environments is increasingly becoming a tall order. The cost of deploying and administering PCs—sometimes tens of thousands of PCs—across an enterprise can be significant, especially without the proper infrastructure in place to aid in the automation of these tasks.”

Additionally, mobile and temporary workers as well as new data security and compliance create growing complexity in regulated industries. With the Indian notebook PC market growing at a phenomenal rate the theft of corporate data has become a serious concern for most organizations. Demands from end users are going up with users wanting to access their corporate data from anywhere, work from any PC in any office and wanting to be always on and connected. At the same time, end-users do not want to experience downtime associated with network outages, application non-availability, and security or application issues. In such an environment, the advent of fast networking and virtualization has opened the door for large enterprises examining architectures such as desktop virtualization.

Hauger added, “Enterprises that are exploring desktop virtualization are early adopters, and they will prove the usefulness of this technology over the next few years.” Most companies that have opted for desktop virtualization options have sizable IT departments, which are regulated, managed IT environments. Such enterprises want to keep operational cost low, increase output, and improve the utilization and efficiency of their desktop environment. It is expected that the more extensive and sophisticated an enterprise’s infrastructure is, the more it can benefit from virtualization and flexible desktop deployment solutions.

Desktop management and security challenges

Indian enterprises are facing issues in the form of end point security and regulatory pressure. When a PC is lost, damaged, or stolen along with the proprietary or private data that is stored upon it, the results can be negative press and even legal consequences. In some industries, healthcare in particular, the law prevents restricts sensitive data from leaving the data center and users are not permitted to store or manipulate client data on their own devices. Companies are also going in for Business Continuity Planning, which emphasizes the need to protect IT systems (including desktops) and run a global operation. Many organizations in India have also experienced that users install non-approved programs, break crucial functionality such as anti-virus, fail to perform backups, and forget to apply security patches and hot fixes. It is in these scenarios that desktop virtualization can play a critical role in better management and decreasing the cost of managing desktops.

Hard to resist

The benefit which desktop virtualization offers is hard to resist. Through centralized control of applications and data, this technology ensures that IT can protect corporate data, even if a remote system is lost or infected. This feature is extremely helpful in a BPO scenario wherein a company has multiple systems with vital customer data. Through this, business users can recover rapidly from accidental data loss, laptop theft, or malware infection and there is a balance between control and usability. Souma Das, Area Vice President, Citrix India, said, “Desktop virtualization has become one of the most talked-about technologies in recent years because it breaks the hard-coded link between hardware and software, allowing individual computing components to be dynamically combined and reassembled for maximum efficiency and agility. Centralized control allows fast and easy provisioning of new systems for permanent and temporary workers in any location.” Broadly speaking, through desktop virtualization, IT can have a secure, standardized, and centrally controlled corporate desktop environment. Desk-side visits are virtually eliminated in this scenario so that IT can provide faster support with lower costs and business users don’t need to wait for personnel to come on-site for support, so that they can get back to work faster.

abhinav.singh@expressindia.com