The answer is very dependent on the value they are trying to achieve. It's as personal and unique as a choice of a car, house, or pet.
Consider the following questions:
- Does working outside the office provide value? (productivity, telework, mobility)
- Does allowing users to work from arbitrary devices provide value? (productivity, flexibility, BYOD, mobility)
- Does allowing work from remote locations reduce costs? (telework – no need for office space)
- Does sandboxing work related applications and data protect corporate assets? (security)
- Does a guaranteed homogenous environment simplify management? (desktop management, security)
- Would the ability to completely control and change the user environment in hours or minutes be beneficial (desktop management, security)
- How valuable would it be to enroll a new employee in minutes, without having to “order” hardware? (desktop management)
- How valuable would it be to do an enterprise wide desktop OS or application upgrade overnight? (desktop management)
- How valuable would it be to have a system that ensures that every user get the applications they need, and when their role change the applications automatically change to match?
- What is the value of any application, any data, for any user on any device, any where, any time?
The idea that you can decouple all the layers of a user experience – the location, the user, the device, the applications, the data, the management infrastructure, the security infrastructure, hardware, software, storage, etc – and put them together in any desirable way and get the desired result is an extremely powerful concept. This is the idea that virtualization enables.
You’ll note that I’ve not talked about saving money on hardware or software. While not impossible, if you start a VDI project thinking you’re going to save money on capital costs I tend to think you’re going to be disappointed. This goal tends to force decision making down a cost-cutting path which ultimately impacts user experience and thus acceptance. We don’t do this strictly to save money.
In my mind it usually comes down to one or more of these:
- Security
- Management
- BYOD
- Mobility
- Flexibility/Adaptability/Agility/Personalization
- http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2012/03/28/why-vdi-5-reasons-people-really-use-vdi.aspx
- http://www.infoworld.com/article/2623852/vdi/top-5-reasons-to-consider-vdi-in-2011.html
- http://www.biztechmagazine.com/article/2012/09/4-reasons-why-your-business-should-implement-vdi
- http://www.gggroup.net/blog/223-5-reasons-to-adopt-vdi-virtual-desktop-infrastructure
- http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Virtualization/Deploy-VDI-Now10-Reasons-to-Make-the-Switch-Instead-of-Replacing-Your-PCs-521168/
