Enterprise Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: Creating the Virtual Workspace for Employees Everywhere

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1 WHITE PAPER Enterprise Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: Creating the Virtual Workspace for Employees Everywhere Sponsored by: NTT Communications Robert Young September 2014 Al Gillen IDC OPINION The rapid influx of smart devices, including tablets and phones, has greatly accelerated the bring-yourown-device (BYOD) trend, which in turn is creating an ever-mounting management challenge for today's IT environment. The entry of diverse untrusted devices, multiple operating systems, and consumer-oriented applications into what used to be a controlled IT environment creates an onslaught of potential security holes and governance nightmares. While consumerization and mobile workforce trends are adding significant complexity to IT operations, the increase in employee productivity, collaboration, and satisfaction that mobile technologies offer is not lost on business leaders. Business leaders are looking to IT to deliver a mobile workspace that allows employees to access corporate data, applications, and communication resources on their devices of choice. But making the most of the opportunity while minimizing risks can be complex and overwhelming for many IT teams. Hence it makes more sense than ever for IT leaders to consider virtual client computing (VCC) solutions. The benefits of VCC include centralized desktop and application management, any device access to corporate IT resources, and an increased ability to protect corporate intellectual property. What's more, capabilities for provisioning desktop images allow IT staff to more effectively ensure proper hardware configurations and software currency/licensing, manage user access, and demonstrate compliance with industry and governmental regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, PCI, and FISMA. While VCC enables cost savings and productivity benefits for IT organizations and business users alike, IDC's conversations with high-level administrators and CIOs have revealed a lack of understanding about client virtualization implementations. In addition, many of these organizations have only basic desktop management skills to begin with, making the transition that much harder. September 2014, IDC #251355

2 However, moving desktop provisioning and management to service provider hosted environments (aka "the cloud") can help IT organizations avoid large capital outlays and failed implementations. Other benefits of going with a cloud service provider for virtual desktops include: On-demand workspace full desktops or just apps Ability to try before you buy Scale by user or by group Fast time to value IDC finds that for larger virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementations (over 2,500 seats), organizations spend $165 per user per year over a five-year period on servers, storage, and networking, including more than $1.3 million of up-front investment. However, the per-user numbers are based on economies of scale. It is unlikely that organizations with deployments of fewer than 1,000 seats will be able to reach such economic levels with an on-premise implementation. When enterprises consider a workspace-as-a-service (WaaS) offering, which is the expansion of a hosted desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) deployment to include application services and related features, they must also consider how much control and integration with existing processes a chosen provider can offer. Smaller organizations prefer letting the service provider control and manage everything, whereas larger organizations may require greater control over their desktops. NTT Communications' (NTT Com's) Enterprise Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (E-VDI) offers different options of control, providing the right amount of flexibility depending on the size of the customer. In addition, NTT Com's E-VDI offering is delivered as a monthly service and is built on a global seamless network, with one-stop operation and an on-demand customer portal. SITUATION OVERVIEW The consumerization of IT is creating more demanding business users, increasing security issues, and reducing the ability of IT to govern users to ensure compliance with corporate policy. As the lines continue to blur between corporate-owned and personally owned devices and between work offices and home offices, a mobile and global workforce now expects to have access to corporate data on multiple devices anywhere at any time. This shift and the persistent consumerization drive the need for IT executives to continually address their organizations' changing technology needs. Failure to do so often results in employees circumventing the IT department's procurement policies and procedures, commonly referred to as "shadow IT," which is an unfortunate but growing trend. The long-term effects of shadow IT can be detrimental to both the business and the IT organization, often resulting in higher technology costs, increased risk of data compromises, and less information continuity across the organization. As a result, more and more IT executives are caught between a rock and a hard place when attempting to empower users with modern technologies while still maintaining proper governance and control over their organizations' increasingly diverse and burgeoning IT assets IDC #

3 Even when IT organizations had the benefit of supporting relatively homogeneous environments, managing corporate-owned desktop PCs and laptops remained an uphill battle, with many IT administrators relying on manual processes and disparate endpoint management solutions for provisioning, configuring, securing, and maintaining client devices. Furthermore, traditional desktop management tools and processes often require business users to hand over their devices to IT for undetermined and often extended periods of time. The inability of IT to truly manage devices effectively leads to increased end-user downtime. This loss of productivity can multiply significantly in scenarios where there is limited or no onsite IT staff, and thus equipment must be shipped to and from the IT department located in the corporate home office. This approach to endpoint management is becoming increasingly inefficient, especially as globalization and mobility trends cause organizations to become ever more dispersed. A distinct advantage of VDI is that it enables IT organizations to centralize business users' desktops in a corporate datacenter, where the IT staff usually is located. As a result, IT staff can more efficiently provision new client instances, centralize desktop management, and provide endpoint security even for systems residing well outside of the corporate firewall. What's more, virtual desktops and applications can provide IT organizations with increased consistency across system settings and policies. This is largely due to the fact that, in a virtual desktop delivery model, system configuration attributes are far less reliant on the underlying hardware. As a result, VDI can aid IT organizations in streamlining and reducing their image inventory to a few gold images or perhaps even a single image. In addition, with VDI, IT can provide a more consistent and seamless desktop experience to the rapidly expanding population of employees who seek to use multiple devices to conduct business transactions. For example, in most VDI implementations, business users can access the same desktop instance in each new session, as well as securely access corporate data and applications anytime and anywhere, through one set of policies and log-ins. Best of all, this takes place regardless of the hardware or operating system or location being used to access the instance. VIRTUAL CLIENT COMPUTING INFRASTRUCTURE The client virtualization space was shaken up nearly a decade ago by the introduction of the centralized virtual desktop (CVD), IDC's terminology for what is commonly known as VDI. Up until that point, the client virtualization market consisted solely of virtual user session (VUS) software, which is a multiuser implementation of, typically, a Windows environment. The hype around and rapid growth of VDI have led to many calling their solutions "VDI," when in fact the solutions could consist of VUS software and VDI technologies. This is why it's important to understand the differences between the two technologies. While both VDI and VUS provide similar benefits, there are important end-user and back-end implications to consider. Because VDI is based on virtual machines (VMs), servers can typically host only about users depending on the workload, and VDI storage costs are generally higher than VUS storage costs. However, VDI can provide greater personalization for end users and a more consistent experience because users can access the same guest operating system during each session IDC #

4 VUS is typically cheaper to manage and run than VDI because VUS can scale to over 200 user sessions per server. And because there is less personalization in VUS, VUS storage costs tend to be lower than VDI storage costs. However, there are some application compatibility issues with VUS as some applications are hard coded to run on client operating systems only. Nonetheless, VUS can be set up to stream only a single application, completely hiding the underlying desktop, which is becoming more important in this mobile-first world. Ideally, organizations should assess their situation and understand which users are prime candidates for client virtualization and then figure out which technology (VDI or VUS) can provide the greatest benefits. Regardless of the route chosen, IDC has seen several universal benefits among companies deploying either client virtualization solution. One key benefit of implementing VDI or VUS is that centralized desktop management capabilities for provisioning desktop images allow IT staff to more effectively ensure proper hardware configurations and software currency/licensing, manage user access, and demonstrate compliance with industry and governmental regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, PCI, and FISMA. Virtualized client computing can also simplify operating system migrations because it can reduce the number of golden images (or master copy that contains the prepped operating system and applications for a given group) needed and completely abstracts any potential hardware issues. And since the data sits in a datacenter and streams to the endpoint, leaving no data on the actual device, client virtualization stands to improve endpoint security and data loss prevention. Many businesses are looking to client virtualization solutions for relief because they provide: Centralized management "Any device" access Reduced operational costs Ability to protect corporate intellectual property However, many of these projects get sidetracked because deploying client virtualization infrastructure can be complex and require high up-front capital expenditures. Further, many organizations do not have the in-house expertise to deploy, manage, and scale a client virtualization implementation efficiently and effectively. Luckily, in the past few years, more and more vendors have started to provide hosted client virtualization offerings consisting of desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and desktop-applications-as-aservice (DAaaS) offerings. DaaS is the (private or public) cloud delivery of a virtual desktop to an end user. This can be achieved by remotely accessing a CVD (aka VDI) or a VUS. DAaaS is the (private or public) cloud delivery of a desktop application, usually a native Windows application. This can be achieved by using either VUS technology or application virtualization technology. It is recommended that user state virtualization technology, while not required, be implemented to maintain consistency for end users across devices and technologies IDC #

5 Today, many organizations are looking to outsource virtual desktops; however, the rise in mobility is increasingly driving the demand toward applications and data. It is this full workspace experience that end users want to be able to access anywhere, anytime, anyplace. IDC refers to unified DaaS and DAaaS offerings as workspace as a service, or WaaS. In this white paper, we focus on the benefits of using cloud-delivered client virtualization technology to deliver desktops, applications, and services as part of a comprehensive workspace strategy. WHY WORKSPACE AS A SERVICE? For IT organizations looking to implement a desktop transformation project, it is important to ask who has the staff, infrastructure, and expertise to enable and support the delivery and management of applications at a competitive cost. It may not be you! While the total cost to deploy client virtualization is coming down rapidly with simplified software solutions, converged infrastructure, and even turnkey appliances, the deployment of an on-premise solution still requires a staff with existing expertise or hiring professional services and purchasing at least some new hardware. Moving desktop management to the cloud can help IT organizations avoid large capital outlays, stalled deployments, and failed implementations. Likewise, hosted client virtualization offerings can help eliminate the painful discussion with the CFO to get approval for large capital outlays, changing the conversation from up-front capex and implementation costs to opex that is recognized on an ongoing basis. Yes, budget conversations still need to occur and internal ROI models should be created, but that is true of any new technology initiative. Going with a cost that is recognized operationally essentially eliminates capital investment risk. For organizations that are looking to avoid a large capital outlay and the complexity of deploying a full VDI implementation but still want to maintain control over the management of desktops and/or applications that option will still be available in a hosted scenario. In addition, because client virtualization service providers are experts dedicated to optimizing user experience, IT organizations can mitigate concerns on the implementation, management, and performance of their virtualized environment. And since WaaS is a cloud service, it is possible for a subscriber to scale up or down by user or even by group as needs change. The following factors are key drivers for businesses to use a WaaS solution: Lack of up-front capital No or minimal internal expertise available on staff Need to support geographic expansion Need to support seasonal workers Need to ease integration after mergers and acquisitions 2014 IDC #

6 NTT COMMUNICATIONS' E-VDI NTT Com's E-VDI provides customers with a full WaaS environment, delivering the mission-critical enterprise benefits of desktop and application virtualization such as scalability, security, performance, and efficiency. These benefits are delivered via the cloud "as a service" along with operational capabilities such as management and licensing components uniquely architected to help cloud service providers achieve time to market and economically scale their business. The E-VDI solution is offered as a monthly service and is built on specialized, proprietary, top-tier equipment. As a result, E-VDI allows all the benefits of a VDI cloud computing environment while placing the up-front expense and training costs outside of management's zone of responsibility. This means the risks and expenses for NTT Com's E-VDI are considerably lower than those associated with on-premise VDI. NTT Com's E-VDI addresses the four characteristics of a successful cloud computing environment: Global coverage Network seamless One-stop operation On-demand customer portal NTT Com acquires, provisions, and manages the underlying E-VDI hardware and provides overall administration. IT organizations can configure workstations for teams per real-time demands without the need for extra training and/or additional personnel to implement and manage new on-premise infrastructure. In addition, because the machines are virtual and cloud hosted, changes can be made swiftly without replacing hardware. What's more, as a prominent network carrier, NTT Com delivers open and closed networking capabilities to more than 196 countries, with a significant presence in Asia. This uniquely positions the company to provide its global customers with integrated cloud and networking services in addition to hosted virtual desktops. Likewise, NTT Com's E-VDI solution allows IT organizations to mitigate the network bandwidth, routing, and storage design challenges commonly associated with implementing a virtualized client computing environment. As a result, IT departments can more efficiently and effectively drive their organizations' VDI strategy. NTT Com also provides its customers with a unified service and billing portal. The portal allows customers to closely monitor and/or modify their networking as well as virtual desktop services from anywhere and anytime with single sign-on access. When problems occur with the hosted service, customers can directly consult with specialists on NTT Com's staff who maintain a deep level of expertise in dealing with the specialized hardware and software integral to the E-VDI offering IDC #

7 FUTURE OUTLOOK The variety of desktop platforms, desktop implementation methods, and preferences related to what devices to use at work will only grow in the coming years as will the problems associated with supporting the ever-growing array of devices and applications. NTT Com's innovative E-VDI offering solves these and other remote end-user computing problems by providing a tightly integrated virtual platform for collaboration available from any supported device, through a reliable gateway that ensures data isolation, data security, management control, and global consistency as an integral part of the user experience. In addition, E-VDI enables a centralized approach to desktop management that stands to simplify and reduce the cost of IT operations, allowing IT staff to spend less time on manual endpoint management tasks and focus more energy toward implementing innovative and business-impacting technologies. Furthermore, consistent and secure access to virtualized corporate desktops aims to not only increase IT staff and business user productivity but also mitigate the data security risks often associated with mobile and BYOD initiatives. IDC forecasts the VCC market will grow from $3.1 billion in 2014 to $4.7 billion in 2018, representing a five-year CAGR of 10.7%. However, because up-front costs and complexity of on-premise client virtualization implementations will increasingly drive organizations to look for an outsourced delivery model, the WaaS market is projected to grow from $466 million in 2014 to $1.7 billion in 2018, representing a five-year CAGR of 42.5%. It is clear that the overall market will be driven by the hosted segment, made possible by customers overcoming their initial fears of cloud-hosted desktops and desktop applications, leading customers to making substantial investments in their next-generation solutions through WaaS vendors. In fact, many customers are moving beyond simply testing WaaS solutions with just office applications in small workgroups to deploying mission-critical line-of-business applications in the cloud. CHALLENGES/OPPORTUNITIES Integration Challenges The technology landscape remains fiercely competitive. NTT Com, like any technology leader, consistently monitors the market, listens to customers, and dedicates resources to research and development to ensure it is offering superior technology that the company believes will be seen as highly valuable to its clients. However, it's important to note that software licensing and delivery often remains dependent on the individual software licensing model used by application and infrastructure software ISVs. As a result, not all products have an option that integrates with the DaaS, DAaaS, or SaaS market models, and other products that do have such an option may be more costly to purchase using a virtualized deployment scenario. This challenge is expected to self-correct over the next few years as mobile and remote computing becomes an increasingly powerful factor in business software design and all software vendors see the need to aggressively compete for share in the WaaS market IDC #

8 Implementation Challenges During interviews with CIOs, CTOs, and individual IT contributors, IDC has found limited knowledge about the benefits and opportunities associated with a WaaS computing model and its underlying technology layers. This dearth of understanding will require an evangelical sales approach, applying resources to train customer IT team members to use and understand the benefits of cloud-based client virtualization solutions. With regard to connecting mobile computing devices to company resources, knowledge workers have become accustomed to doing what they want, whenever they want. This attitude frequently includes a willingness to defy company policy to get their jobs done and often without considering the risks to the company. Depending on an organization's corporate culture, it may be a training and education challenge to rein in knowledge workers yet allow them to thrive within a more restrictive connection environment. In this scenario, productivity benefits for both IT and business users can be gained by leveraging cloud discovery tools in conjunction with hosted client virtualization solutions, enabling IT departments to start identifying business-critical applications and delivering them to employees from the cloud. In addition, WaaS relies on connectivity with off-premise datacenters, which are highly secure but are potentially significantly distant from where workers are physically located. In particular, companies with remote workers or locations in developing geographies have the potential to experience data bottlenecks related to lower-quality or lower-bandwidth communications between where the work is being done and the service providers' datacenters, even if located in the same country. As a result, cloud service providers must effectively communicate and educate customers on how their network and datacenter infrastructure can address these concerns. Business Environment Opportunities The demand for hosted client virtualization solutions will continue to rise in response to the demand for a flexible workspace, a demand that is currently undergoing an aggressive growth phase. NTT Com's hardware and infrastructure software solutions are tested to ensure optimal performance in demanding situations. What's more, the layered software from Citrix and VMware, leaders in the client virtualization software market according to IDC, offer mature and reliable products that are well suited for commercial deployments. The maturity of these products benefits all organizations adopting a hosted VDI solution. The largest potential impediment is software licensing and delivery for a WaaS environment as software distribution tools and licensing structures, specifically intended for hosted virtualized client environments, have yet to fully mature. Companies that offer both general business applications and specific line-of-business applications that have the potential to be deployed in a hosted environment are on notice to bring their products in line with customer use scenarios. Implementation Opportunities If the buzz about obtaining improved productivity from flexible, remote computing workspaces can be supported by solid performance experiences among early users, then early-mover organizations adopting hosted VCC solutions are likely to gain competitive advantage from greater end-user productivity and smoother cost recognition profiles. Organizations can become less constrained by geography and benefit from the global scale that their WaaS providers can deliver IDC #

9 ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE Disruptive trends such as the consumerization of IT, BYOD, and mobility are driving increasingly heterogeneous and hybrid IT environments that, in turn, are adding significant complexity to the distribution and management of desktops, applications, and services within the enterprise. In addition, business users are demanding fast and easy access to a wide range of applications to enhance productivity. Therefore, IT organizations must increasingly streamline and optimize processes for delivering and managing enterprise applications and services to remain relevant and efficient and reduce unnecessary cost within their organizations. A distinct advantage of VCC is that it enables IT organizations to centralize desktops in the core datacenter, where the IT staff is located. As a result, IT staff can more efficiently provision new client devices, centralize desktop management, and provide endpoint security even for systems residing outside of the corporate office. What's more, virtual desktops can allow IT organizations to employ increased continuity across system settings and policies. A virtualized client environment can provide IT departments with an enhanced ability to perform zero- or low-touch desktop administration and management tasks such as adding, deleting, upgrading, and patching system software as well as troubleshooting and remediating issues. While there are many benefits to implementing a virtualized client environment (such as central management, security, and agility), client virtualization solutions can be highly complex to deploy and difficult to scale without proper knowledge and experience. In addition, VDI can have large up-front capital costs. It will require new servers, storage, and networking to be able to scale properly and efficiently. And it will need to be implemented and managed by people with experience and knowledge in this area. As a result, IDC expects that factors such as the lack of up-front capital, limited or no client virtualization management expertise with internal staff, the need to support globalization and mobility expansions, and the need to simplify integration work after mergers and acquisitions will be key concerns for organizations seeking hosted client virtualization solutions. When customers are looking at service providers, they should keep in mind the following considerations: Security. From identity management to VPNs to physical security, businesses need to be aware of how secure the service provider is and what steps the service provider is taking to secure its infrastructure and your data. Cloud service providers need to be aware of regulatory compliance issues that apply to a given customer's industry and adhere to the appropriate regulations. Reliability. It is essential that the desktop workload has high availability. In fact, in most cases, high availability is even more important with virtual desktops and applications than with other workloads as an unplanned outage or a network slowdown will directly lower business user productivity. Service-level agreements (SLAs). SLAs for the cloud services can vary widely, and the penalty for missing an SLA must be clear. Therefore, customers should examine desktop workload, networking, and data SLAs, along with backup/recovery and disaster recovery plans that their service providers have in place. High-quality service providers will lead with their SLA terms and will not try to hide them in the small print of the contracts IDC #

10 Flexible management of operating systems and applications. Smaller organizations will want a fully outsourced model, where everything is managed, from the hardware to the applications. Larger organizations that have spent years creating policies and procedures that they are comfortable with will want the ability to preserve and apply these policies to their hosted environment. It is important for a service provider to be flexible to each customer's needs. NTT Com's E-VDI offering provides a tightly integrated virtual platform, allowing access for any supported device, through a reliable gateway that ensures data isolation, data security, management control, and global consistency as integral parts of the user experience. E-VDI enables a centralized approach to desktop management that stands to simplify and reduce the cost of IT operations, allowing IT staff to spend less time on manual endpoint management tasks and focus more energy toward implementing innovative and business-impacting technologies. Having the capability to manage users and desktops internally yet deploy them externally is a critical factor for enterprises as they start to look at WaaS offerings. Yet having the option to completely outsource desktop management is critical for small business adoption. E-VDI provides a solution that can cater to both constituencies IDC #

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