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Large changes are happening within the work landscape as work-from-home and hybrid cloud ecosystems are becoming commonplace. With the sprawl of employees and environments, it has become difficult to administer the manageability, security, and infrastructure requirements needed to keep a business running. Due to these challenges, IT leaders are looking for tools that securely ease the management of these environments without breaking the bank. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is that tool.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is the creation and management of desktop environments and applications that allow employees to work and access applications and services outside the office, in the office, or from a remote location. United Cloud solutions support VDI deployments by creating a virtual compute system — known as virtual machines (VMs) — that allows organizations to run multiple applications and operating systems on a single physical server in a data center. VDI is enabled through hosting a desktop operating system — such as Microsoft Windows Desktop — within VMs that all run on a host server.

By using the desktop operating system hosted on a virtual machine (VM) on a host server, IT managers can deploy their corporate data, applications, and desktops to users in a virtual data center and deliver them as a service via the Internet. This is in contrast to traditional PCs, where a user utilizes a physical, portable personal endpoint device from an on-premises location.

When implementing a VDI solution, a connection broker finds a virtual desktop within the resource pool for each employee to connect to when accessing the VDI environment. 

Users can securely connect to their desktop images, like Microsoft Windows, through any device or location. Having the ability to access your applications from anywhere is helpful because it means you don’t need to be in the office at your physical desktop with an endpoint machine, and it allows you to BYOD — “bring your own devices” — (including PCs, tablets, or thin client terminals) from wherever is easiest for you.

• Call centers: VDI allows the employees in the call center to access only the information and tools needed to complete their tasks. This streamlines efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
• Remote work: VDI enables team members to access the same company networks, applications, and resources while being geographically dispersed since the VDIs can all be deployed and managed from a central point.
• Regulatory compliance: Some heavily regulated industries have run into problems with their employees storing confidential information improperly. Centralizing the management with VDI helps eliminate the problem of incorrectly storing data and applications.
• Third-party access: When leveraging a contractor or business partner, these employees need company-owned hardware to connect to the entire system. This is expensive, especially for shorter projects. This makes VDI the ideal solution to give contractors secure access to company information without needing to provide or procure hardware.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is an integral part of many companies’ IT strategy because it allows businesses to reduce their expenses and simplify the management of these systems. The importance of VDI is becoming exponentially accelerated as companies look at enabling a more flexible work landscape because it provides the accessibility, security, scalability, automation and ease of use to implement quickly and effectively.