What can be done to democratize VDI?
From the need to secure data in highly regulated industries like banking and healthcare, to mitigating the risks of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, there are dozens of reasons for businesses to invest in virtualized desktop infrastructures (VDI).
Yet for all this, VDI has remained something of a niche technology, often deployed more to help IT to solve a specific deployment or security problem than to provide users with the best possible experience. There are multiple factors that have led to this situation, but one that faces companies most immediately when deciding whether to adopt VDI is a monumental talent gap.
A vicious cycle
While IT skills shortages are hardly news, the VDI shortage is even more dramatic than elsewhere in the industry, in part because it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When new IT workers start out, they almost inevitably spend their first few years working with physical machines. Moreover, as more virtualization is moved to cloud, and therefore external providers, there is even less opportunity for junior IT workers to learn about the inner workings of VDI.
This means that, unless they specifically want to work in the VDI space, the vast majority of IT professionals will, at best, only get a superficial understanding of desktop virtualization.
This has created a situation where, simultaneously, demand for VDI is increasing while the pool of genuinely knowledgeable employees continues to shrink. Consequently, the burdens being placed on already overstretched VDI teams is being exacerbated, not only putting them at serious risk of burnout, but also prolonging the issues experienced by anyone using a virtual desktop across the enterprise.
Creating a VDI triage system
One helpful analogy is to imagine what it would be like if cars were handled in the same way as VDI. If every single time someone had any sort of issue with their vehicle – even something as small as putting air in the tires or filling it up with gas – they had to send it off to a specialist mechanic. The volume of work would quickly overload all the available repair shops. But because most IT professionals have so little hands on VDI experience, even the most minor issues can end up being escalated for L3 support.
So, what can be done? Realistically, upskilling a significant enough proportion of IT workers to alleviate the shortage isn’t going to happen, especially given that virtualization infrastructure is far from the only area of tech dealing with such a problem. Instead, we need to democratize the initial stages of handling VDI problems, so that quick-fixes and non-VDI related issues are able to be triaged by other people. This speeds up remediation time while removing the demand that VDI specialists address every little issue themselves.
Zen and the art of VDI maintenance
In order to enable non-VDI specialists to triage VDI issues, there needs to be a clear system in place that allows them to easily run through a handful of basic troubleshooting steps. Is the user is having connectivity issues? Is the problem on the application side, rather than the virtual desktop? Are there any obvious performance bottlenecks?
First and foremost, given that the single most common ‘VDI problem’ is something that isn’t actually related to the virtual infrastructure, this approach allows IT teams to redirect a host of tickets to the correct team. But more than this, having proper triage systems in place means that even those IT people with almost zero knowledge of how VDI works under the hood can still carry out basic fixes, while passing more complex tickets up the chain.
The benefits here are manyfold. Most importantly, implementing a triage system means that impacted users can get their issues resolved faster, which can have a huge impact on enterprise productivity. Secondly, giving non-VDI specialists greater exposure to virtualized infrastructure will naturally help them upskill in that area, and potentially even push them to take it up as a career path. And finally, the workload on the VDI team can be radically reduced, allowing them more time to focus on the thorniest issues.
Shifting left isn’t optional
Ultimately, for any business looking to get substantial value out of their VDI investments, the status quo isn’t tenable. VDI can offer enhanced security and scalability, easier compliance, and lower overall costs.
But those advantages can only be realized if the VDI performance is good enough for the end users to be as productive as they would be on a physical machine. This doesn’t happen if issues are piling up and harassed VDI teams are constantly firefighting.
By giving IT teams the capabilities to properly shift left their VDI maintenance, monitoring, and remediation, businesses have the rare opportunity to solve three problems at once. Democratizing VDI maintenance spreads the workload more evenly, upskilling junior team members, and reducing the impact on end users.
