16 Nov 4 Ways Virtual Desktop Hosting Boosts Productivity in Business
Virtual desktop hosting is quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing trends in many modern businesses, and with good reason. Sold as a service, virtual desktop hosting takes the responsibility of local server upkeep and maintenance off the back of the business, allowing them to re-allocate those resources to grow in other areas.
In a previous blog, we explained some of the reasons why virtual desktop hosting can be a great way to reduce your company’s overall hardware costs. But lower costs are just the beginning: the real benefits of Desktop-as-a-Service start to make themselves apparent when you start to consider just how much more efficiency virtual desktops can bring to an office environment.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at four key ways virtual desktop hosting can help your business stand out from the back by helping your employees to not only work faster, but work better – using the resources you already have in place.
1. Dynamic Resource Assignment
While the advent of the Internet made information sharing possible in ways never before imaginable, hosted servers were still required to contain all that data. Unfortunately, even the servers with the biggest data space allocation still had limits to how much they could hold, and companies that operated using a large number of diverse files and programs would eventually find themselves having to split up everything between multiple servers in the server farm.
This data was still technically accessible to the company, but individual computers operating off of one server might be unable to accesss files and programs hosted on another. Among the other problems this could cause, splitting data throughout multiple servers meant that employees might not be able to access mission-critical files until the IT team could create a fix, with valuable time being wasted in the process.
One of the key benefits of a virtual desktop environment is its capability for dynamic resource assignment. Virtual desktops send all the data stored on them to the Cloud, creating one large pool allowing anyone with the proper credentials to access the files they need regardless of any other factors. Files and programs are available on-demand and scalable to the individual machine running them without IT having to lift a finger.
2. Processing Power
Another drawback of traditional servers was their processing power. Over time, as more and more files were added, users might find their computers chugging along to load everything requested, slowing work to a crawl. If managers wanted to get back up to speed, they first had to make a costly upgrade.
Desktop-as-a-Service allows managers to outsource their server needs to their service provider. While this comes with the obvious benefit of decreased front-end costs for physical upkeep and maintenance, it also pays dividends over time by eliminating updates and upgrades from the equation, with this burden now falling on the service provider – who has a vested interest in providing users with the fastest processing possible.
With greater processing power at your disposal, even the largest of documents and applications load quickly and operate fluidly. The days of opening up a spreadsheet or application only to waste several minutes waiting for it to load are over; now, employees get easy, on-demand access to every file they need.
3. Integrations
Another problem traditional servers carried was the lack of accessibility across multiple platforms running different types of programs. If files loading slowly wasn’t bad enough, depending on the type of programs an individual computer had installed, users might not be able to access certain files or file types at all.
Most applications virtualize easily and integrate seamlessly into the VDI, but even demanding applications (such as security or printer applications) are much easier to access and use after a successful integration. This means that, in addition to being able to access their files and applications more quickly than ever before, they’ll be able to access any mission-critical data from any machine on the network, regardless of its individual specifications.
4. IT Efficiency
While the three previous points focused on seperate areas that help increase accessibility and efficiency on the part of the individual user, taken as a whole, these individual factors all lead to fewer headaches for your internal IT staff.
VDI’s centralized nature means that more of the jobs that would traditionally fall on the IT department or the individual user are now handled at the administrative level. This means less individual training is necessary, so IT can focus its energy on more agile, strategic initiatives. Employees can spend less time leaning on IT for routine maintenance and more time being productive and producing results.
With server upkeep and maintenance outsourced to the service provider and accessibility issues negated on the part of the user, time traditinally spent fixing problems can now be allocated toward preventing them from occuring in the first place.
What this all means: virtual desktop hosting means business-wide productivity boosts for employees, administrators, and maintenance personnel.
Interested in learning more about the many benefits that virtual desktop hosting can bring to your business? Download our free informative guide, 10 Ways Virtual Desktop Hosting Saves Time and Money in Business, for more great tips and strategies to help you create a better, more effective workforce at any office.