Ours is a brave new digital world in which there’s no place for the old monolithic desktops of the past. To truly digitally transform, organizations require that enterprise desktops be transformed first. Unlike server workloads, desktop workloads remain severely undermanaged and under-architected. This lack of strategy in desktop delivery continues to drive up costs and security risks while undermining the productivity of workers.
Most chief information officers (CIOs) and enterprises understand that they are paying a price for relying on legacy desktop models, yet the difficulty and the enormity of the desktop transformation process continue to stall this necessary progression. However, there is a way to move forward, and the path to desktop transformation starts foremost by changing our mindsets. By looking at desktops differently, we can take stock of the problems, but more so, capitalize on the opportunities that arise from evolving our desktop strategy.
What Is Desktop Transformation?
Desktop transformation goes beyond migrating to any single technology, platform or vendor. It’s not just virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), remote desktop session host (RDSH), desktop as a service (DaaS), or cloud, neither is it limited to Liquidware strategic alliance partners like VMware, Citrix, Microsoft or Amazon WorkSpaces. Instead, the concept embraces all these technologies with a mindset of harmonizing these disparate platforms to work as one holistic infrastructure.
A transformed desktop is a re-engineered workspace that is unencumbered by the outmoded legacy processes that keep desktops rigid and risky. These re-engineered workspaces yield tremendous benefits in productivity by providing great user experience at scale while reducing the management burden on desktop administrators. Finally, to ensure the maximum long-term benefits and knock-on transformation effect, the new workspace is ultimately flexible and can bypass the limitations of being stovepiped as vendor- and platform-specific.
The Problem Of Monolithic Desktops
In order for such re-engineering to take place, a deep understanding is required of the desktop technologies and how they have matured over time. What we refer to as a desktop is comprised of a few very important resources. In legacy constructs, the user persona, user-authored data, applications and the policies that dictate the user experience and security are all interlocked into a monolithic silo which is closely tied into the device, its operating system (OS) and architecture and allocated compute resources. In this legacy approach, an organization inevitably ends up with hundreds of discrete silos into which there is zero visibility. Managing these silos is difficult and inefficient. When these desktops need to be upgraded or migrated to a new OS or platform, it is an expensive undertaking that typically requires specialized scripting, manual effort and overtime.
Ironically, with monolithic desktops, while overall processes and strategy can remain unchanged for many years, constant churn is taking place at the operations level. Operating systems change, applications change, users or user preferences change, policies are made stricter and applied more widely, platforms are frequently patched, updated or replaced. Organizations running multiple platforms increase the management challenge by an order of magnitude. Desktop administrators spend all of their time propping up an inefficient approach rather than benefitting from a re-engineered environment.
As a result, these challenges appear discouraging and many organizations simply choose to avoid launching a transformation process. The effect is that user experience is negatively affected and can be uneven across groups. When companies factor this churn into their desktop strategy, transformation starts looking a lot more attractive.
The Big Mistake Of Locking Into One Platform Jail
To process data and turn it into something useful for the business, workers need certain valuable desktop resources to be available. The importance of keeping workers productive with a good user experience on their desktops cannot be overstated.
This insight leads us to an important step in planning the desktop transformation initiative, which is deciding how the organization will handle the migration process. Many wonder how to migrate from OS to OS but neglect to consider how to migrate across platforms. If at this point an organization chooses to go with a single platform and that platform’s built-in tools, they will find they are completely locked into the platform and can’t migrate at scale.
How can you circumvent this problem? By prioritizing the persona, apps, data and policy and starting the migration with a process that decouples the persona and user environment management from the device and OS. This step is key to liberating the enterprise from platform jail.
Migration is the best time to implement solutions that can take the desktop beyond the control of a single vendor and the limitations of a stove-piped approach that relegates authority and control over the enterprise’s desktops to a small group of so-called experts.
The Transformation To Tangible
For all businesses, the best place to start on a desktop transformation project is to inventory and examine the resources and processes already in place. Here, it is important to see if there is a way to simplify and improve upon them and to utilize tools that can help streamline the process and perform the tasks of migration in a risk-free, low impact manner.
Another key step in the desktop transformation process is to elevate the core resources and make them tangible. It is critical to find approaches that give the enterprise insight into:
• A method to consistently secure its people and data
• Policies to deliver and protect that persona, app and data
• Visibility into and optimization of the users’ experience
• Decoupling the core resources from the monolithic desktop
By transforming its core resources to tangible assets, the enterprise moves one step closer to freeing itself from platform jail. This freedom spawns the ability to utilize better technology when it is released and to take advantage of lower-cost or more secure solutions as they become available. It’s always in the enterprises’ best interest to avoid lock-in and remain as flexible, agile and scalable as today’s constantly changing business imperatives demand.
The acts of harvesting and deploying its most important resources -- the persona, applications, user data and policy -- and treating them as first-class citizens by making them tangible and portable transforms the enterprise environment from the monolithic desktop structure of yesterday into a centrally managed, portable, fluid and fully optimized experience. Thus transformed, an organization can freely use best-of-breed delivery methods and scale in the management and operation across many delivery methods simultaneously.
