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Waste Not, Want Not - Raising VDI Performance at the Endpoint

Jeff Kalberg

A recent story in APMdigest revealed the amount of operational waste enterprises are experiencing as IT devotes significantly more time to performance issues related to digital transformation initiatives. The research study detailed in the story finds that IT professionals are losing over 2 hours every business day, or 522 hours per year. Study respondents noted a more complex technology environment was a leading culprit in these performance issues.

Complex technology isn't going away. In fact, more than likely, digital transformation will continue to add technical complexity. One area that enables enterprises to reduce complexity and streamline operations is their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Virtualization is a linchpin of digital transformation and effectively optimizing an enterprise's VDI is essential to moving forward with digital technologies.

Delivering the best possible VDI performance means taking a fresh look at what "desktop" means today. The endpoint, or desktop, now can be a physical thin client, a software-defined thin client, a traditional laptop, a phone or tablet.

To reduce operational waste and achieve better performance across the desktop environment, consider these five actions:

1. Accommodating Self-Serve Access

Employees should be able to access certain applications without having to contact an IT help desk. Enabling "self-serve" application access, as appropriate, allows employees to access their personal desktop workspaces, and needed applications, without using valuable IT time.

However, there is a flip side to this: IT needs to control how far employees can take self-service. If employees are spending too much time onboarding more advanced applications, and less time being work-productive, then those applications may need to be controlled by IT.

2. Paying Attention to the Edge

Using centralized management software, IT can control and manage edge devices' use of applications residing in the data center.

For example, software managing thin clients can retrieve a user profile and populate the endpoint with applications that a user needs to be productive. This centralized approach can result in the economies of a single IT person managing as many as 30,000 endpoints – a great reduction in IT time and resources.

3. Thinking Software, not Hardware

Enterprises are moving away from endpoint hardware investments to software that supports the pace of digital transformation. Improving endpoint performance means being able to quickly onboard new employees, deliver custom configurations to a remote workforce using a variety of devices, and to quickly populate new applications for ready use. Endpoint software such as thin client firmware is a means of delivering profiles and applications via a single pane of glass, regardless of device.

4. Understanding User Expectations

Your average worker today wants to use many devices, with the expectation the device will deliver what they need to do their job. The "desktop" of today can range from software-driven thin clients to USB devices. Endpoint management must be able to manage all these devices, control application access and mitigate security risk. It is challenging since, for example, there are many versions of Android and iOS in use, with the threat that users are loading up applications that can pose risk to the network.

USB devices pose one solution, freeing the user from physical boundaries, yet delivering the desired level of endpoint security. A new employee, for example, can plug the device into their personal laptop, and securely receive the configuration and applications they need, without IT ever having to touch the device.

Enterprises are searching for these types of solutions that deliver an optimal user experience without adding to operational complexity.

5. Looking at the Bigger Picture

Getting ahead of digital transformation technology needs, and advancements, is critical to winning the digital game. The alternative is never really catching up with technology and being overwhelmed by the complex IT environments that are becoming standard today.

In the study of operational waste, IT professionals said, if they could reclaim those two hours a day, they would spend more time researching and deploying new systems/technologies.

Staying up to speed on virtualization technology is essential to digital transformation succeeding. Companiesmare innovating technology that plays right into the enablement of high VDI performance. Remote display technology that accommodates workers using graphics intensive applications is an example of delivering innovation that users expect. Freeing up IT time to continue to integrate these enhancements in the user experience has to be part of a thorough digital transformation.

Conclusion: Move Digital Transformation Forward with Optimized VDI

Enterprises are grappling with the challenges of digital transformation, from figuring out cloud deployment, data storage, and BYOD security threats to how to deliver an endpoint experience that optimizes performance.

These five actions will help IT deliver VDI performance that supports digital transformation initiatives. Improvements such as enabling workers to be more self-sufficient, and streamlining endpoint management will reduce operational waste, reduce both operational and capital expenditures, and maps to the market trend toward centralized endpoint management software that can accommodate a variety of devices.

Freeing up IT time will allow IT to better plan for more integration of digital technologies which in turn, increases the enterprise's competitive strength. After all, this is the purpose of digital transformation!

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Waste Not, Want Not - Raising VDI Performance at the Endpoint

Jeff Kalberg

A recent story in APMdigest revealed the amount of operational waste enterprises are experiencing as IT devotes significantly more time to performance issues related to digital transformation initiatives. The research study detailed in the story finds that IT professionals are losing over 2 hours every business day, or 522 hours per year. Study respondents noted a more complex technology environment was a leading culprit in these performance issues.

Complex technology isn't going away. In fact, more than likely, digital transformation will continue to add technical complexity. One area that enables enterprises to reduce complexity and streamline operations is their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Virtualization is a linchpin of digital transformation and effectively optimizing an enterprise's VDI is essential to moving forward with digital technologies.

Delivering the best possible VDI performance means taking a fresh look at what "desktop" means today. The endpoint, or desktop, now can be a physical thin client, a software-defined thin client, a traditional laptop, a phone or tablet.

To reduce operational waste and achieve better performance across the desktop environment, consider these five actions:

1. Accommodating Self-Serve Access

Employees should be able to access certain applications without having to contact an IT help desk. Enabling "self-serve" application access, as appropriate, allows employees to access their personal desktop workspaces, and needed applications, without using valuable IT time.

However, there is a flip side to this: IT needs to control how far employees can take self-service. If employees are spending too much time onboarding more advanced applications, and less time being work-productive, then those applications may need to be controlled by IT.

2. Paying Attention to the Edge

Using centralized management software, IT can control and manage edge devices' use of applications residing in the data center.

For example, software managing thin clients can retrieve a user profile and populate the endpoint with applications that a user needs to be productive. This centralized approach can result in the economies of a single IT person managing as many as 30,000 endpoints – a great reduction in IT time and resources.

3. Thinking Software, not Hardware

Enterprises are moving away from endpoint hardware investments to software that supports the pace of digital transformation. Improving endpoint performance means being able to quickly onboard new employees, deliver custom configurations to a remote workforce using a variety of devices, and to quickly populate new applications for ready use. Endpoint software such as thin client firmware is a means of delivering profiles and applications via a single pane of glass, regardless of device.

4. Understanding User Expectations

Your average worker today wants to use many devices, with the expectation the device will deliver what they need to do their job. The "desktop" of today can range from software-driven thin clients to USB devices. Endpoint management must be able to manage all these devices, control application access and mitigate security risk. It is challenging since, for example, there are many versions of Android and iOS in use, with the threat that users are loading up applications that can pose risk to the network.

USB devices pose one solution, freeing the user from physical boundaries, yet delivering the desired level of endpoint security. A new employee, for example, can plug the device into their personal laptop, and securely receive the configuration and applications they need, without IT ever having to touch the device.

Enterprises are searching for these types of solutions that deliver an optimal user experience without adding to operational complexity.

5. Looking at the Bigger Picture

Getting ahead of digital transformation technology needs, and advancements, is critical to winning the digital game. The alternative is never really catching up with technology and being overwhelmed by the complex IT environments that are becoming standard today.

In the study of operational waste, IT professionals said, if they could reclaim those two hours a day, they would spend more time researching and deploying new systems/technologies.

Staying up to speed on virtualization technology is essential to digital transformation succeeding. Companiesmare innovating technology that plays right into the enablement of high VDI performance. Remote display technology that accommodates workers using graphics intensive applications is an example of delivering innovation that users expect. Freeing up IT time to continue to integrate these enhancements in the user experience has to be part of a thorough digital transformation.

Conclusion: Move Digital Transformation Forward with Optimized VDI

Enterprises are grappling with the challenges of digital transformation, from figuring out cloud deployment, data storage, and BYOD security threats to how to deliver an endpoint experience that optimizes performance.

These five actions will help IT deliver VDI performance that supports digital transformation initiatives. Improvements such as enabling workers to be more self-sufficient, and streamlining endpoint management will reduce operational waste, reduce both operational and capital expenditures, and maps to the market trend toward centralized endpoint management software that can accommodate a variety of devices.

Freeing up IT time will allow IT to better plan for more integration of digital technologies which in turn, increases the enterprise's competitive strength. After all, this is the purpose of digital transformation!

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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Despite the frustrations, every engineer we spoke with ultimately affirmed the value and power of OpenTelemetry. The "sucks" moments are often the flip side of its greatest strengths ... Part 2 of this blog covers the powerful advantages and breakthroughs — the "OTel Rocks" moments ...

OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

Enterprises are turning to AI-powered software platforms to make IT management more intelligent and ensure their systems and technology meet business needs for efficiency, lowers costs and innovation, according to new research from Information Services Group ...

The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...

More than half (51%) of companies are already leveraging AI agents, according to the PagerDuty Agentic AI Survey. Agentic AI adoption is poised to accelerate faster than generative AI (GenAI) while reshaping automation and decision-making across industries ...

Image
Pagerduty

 

Real privacy protection thanks to technology and processes is often portrayed as too hard and too costly to implement. So the most common strategy is to do as little as possible just to conform to formal requirements of current and incoming regulations. This is a missed opportunity ...

The expanding use of AI is driving enterprise interest in data operations (DataOps) to orchestrate data integration and processing and improve data quality and validity, according to a new report from Information Services Group (ISG) ...