Shantanu Ghosh
The Financial Express
Endpoint virtualisation in some form or another—application virtualisation, application streaming, desktop virtualisation, ASP or utility computing—in reality has been around for over a decade now. Nevertheless, the industry is ablaze with talk of this ‘old’ technology. But, why now? Why have organisations started allocating IT budgets for endpoint virtualisation initiatives?
The simple truth is that most of the obstacles standing in the way of endpoint virtualisation, which have prevented the technology from extending its reach deeper into the enterprise are crumbling before it, and those that are not yet falling are poised to do so. Subsequently, as endpoint virtualisation continues to move past each of these hurdles, organisations are seeing more and more value in the technology. Though overcoming any one of these challenges doesn’t have the power to push endpoint virtualisation to the forefront of IT infrastructure prioritisation, if combined they are a powerful force for change.
Economic need drives change. This change is most visible in spending habits, consumption of resources and long-term planning—all to facilitate doing more with less. When the economy is doing well, the need to do more with less is not an issue, but in times of economic uncertainty and woe, many companies encounter the need to change IT habits to meet economic hardship. Endpoint virtualisation offers a viable solution to meet this need, as one of its biggest benefits is cost saving, which accompanies the reduced complexity the technology provides.
In a typical organisation, managing the use of a vast array of different endpoint devices can cause IT administrators untold headaches and cost the organisation real dollars—not only in the resources expended by the IT team trying to solve compatibility issues, but also in the lost productivity of users having to cope with less-than-optimal computing environments, until the issues between their devices and the organisation’s applications are resolved.
A number of vendors dipping their toes into endpoint virtualisation ponder than ever before, and as this happens the technology is becoming a more affordable and a more feasible solution to IT administrators’ need for better endpoint management.
A concern of many would-be endpoint virtualisation adopters has traditionally involved the incapability of the associated supporting technologies. Network reliability and bandwidth influence how effective endpoint virtualisation can be within an organisation, and for this reason, many IT administrators have not adopted the technology.
The writer is vice-president (India product operations), Symantec
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