Desktop Virtualisation: It’s Not Just For Large Enterprises

Businesscomputingworld.co.uk, 2010/07/16

In Brief:

Virtualisation is not a new technology, in fact, it has long been heralded delivering cost-saving and Green benefits to many large enterprises worldwide.(...)

Generally, it is widely believed that innovative technologies such as Virtualisation and Cloud Computing introduced to the market are reserved to benefit large enterprises, who remain the vanguard of the forward-thinkers and trail-blazers. (...)

But a closer look at our customer-base tells a different story, as it boasts a large number of SMBs in a wide variety of sectors. (...)

Key considerations

For SMBs looking to deploy Desktop Virtualisation technology, factors such as cost savings and protecting business critical systems and data are key considerations. We believe that Desktop and Application Virtualisation is a solution which goes hand in hand with company growth, and is a technology in which the architecture can be designed to meet the needs of companies of all sizes, in all different sectors.(...)

Beyond the obvious cost-saving benefit, which in most cases can be a deal-breaker for smaller businesses, Desktop and Application Virtualisation allows SMBs to reduce maintenance costs as well as overall operational and ownership costs of their desktops and application deployment and management. We have found that this can be as much as 40-70%, when compared to SMBs making use of traditional managed PC’s. (...)

Security is always an important issue to consider, and by centralising application resources at the data centre, Desktop Virtualisation helps to provide secure access to a company’s data. (...)

Last, but certainly not least, Desktop Virtualisation can achieve a significant reduction in overall power consumption. The replacement of traditional desktops by thin clients and the centralisation of servers, which optimises processor and memory use, play a major part in reducing the carbon footprint for this infrastructure.

Getting Started

The market has long dictated that Desktop and Application Virtualisation was only a solution for large enterprises, but actually we have found real-world usage which indicates that this technology is very relevant for SMBs. It has a proven track-record, and is a stable and cost-effective solution which offers many benefits, as indicated above. With great flexibility, SMBs are able to deploy an appropriate solution based upon the company’s individual needs.

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