Boosting Security and Business Productivity with Hosted Desktops and Hybrid, Multi-cloud Infrastructure

Powered by HCI, the Adoption of Desktop Hosting Enters a New Phase

The adoption of HCI and VDI, or hosted desktops, happened almost hand in hand when the two technologies emerged into mainstream usage in the 2010s. VDI was adopted to address the deployment, management, and technical support challenges of desktop computing, which had long been major headaches for IT organizations. According to ESG research, 51% of organizations have implemented VDI, and 47% have implemented desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) hosted desktop services. Many other organizations are deploying proofs of concept, planning to do so, or interested in doing so in the near-term future.

HCI emerged as an alternative to the traditional three-tier data center architecture, and in its most advanced forms, it integrates compute, virtualization, data storage, and networking into a single platform. These four hitherto separate infrastructure elements are then managed as a single, unified platform, reducing and simplifying administrative workloads. HCI also radically simplifies infrastructure scaling, as it combines compute with storage in server clusters that are scaled out simply by adding nodes.

These qualities make HCI highly suitable as a platform to host desktops, and initially VDI was the biggest single use case for HCI. Soon, however, HCI was put to work hosting a wide range of other enterprise applications, including mission-critical workloads. A large and growing number of enterprises are now using HCI as the foundation for private clouds, and the architecture is accelerating the transition to hybrid multi-cloud computing by enabling simple and rapid mobility of cloud-native applications between public and private clouds.

Organizations that have deployed VDI solutions have found that, as well as addressing the IT challenges of desktop computing, VDI also provides direct business benefits. One of the key metrics for understanding the impact to the business of hosted desktops is cost-performance. According to recent ESG research, 38% of organizations indicated that improved employee collaboration was one of the benefits they achieved or expect to achieve from their use of hosted desktops, and 37% cited increased employee productivity.