What Companies Can Benefit from Virtual Desktops

Virtual Desktops are cloud-based virtual desktops delivered to individuals and businesses by third-party providers. Because the desktops in question are virtual in nature, they are understood as a service rather than a product. That is why virtual desktops come with end-to-end managed services to cover everything from design and deployment to monitoring and maintenance. With the emergence of the post-pandemic hybrid workspace, many small businesses have adopted virtual desktops as a necessity. Even so, misplaced notions around the essential features of a Virtual Desktop solution – such as security, benefits, and cost – continue to abound. Businesses that have adopted this form of VDI merely to stay alive in the post-pandemic environment now realize the game-changing potential of Virtual Desktops. To their surprise, what started as a survival strategy has rapidly evolved into the reason they are now ahead of their competitors. 

But first, let’s get to the basics.

What is meant by Virtual Desktops?

Virtual Desktops are understood as a service that provides businesses with cloud-hosted virtual desktops developed using the VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) technology. These virtual desktops are available on end-user devices and come fitted with applications that do not need to be purchased separately. The applications are stored on the cloud and can be accessed with a working internet connection. 

Virtual Desktops and Small Businesses

While the pandemic has changed many things, the workspace has transformed to an extent nothing else has. This is because, the very first victim of the pandemic was the ability to work. Employees around the world found it challenging to continue working and delivering with travel restrictions and office closures in full effect. Small businesses were the first to realize that the way we worked had to change if we were to keep working in a world that had changed irrevocably. Out of this necessity to keep going, virtual desktop solutions emerged as the best possible decision these businesses made toward growth and sustainability. Today, VDI Services are not just a big hit, these have become a business-critical tool that everyone needed but did not know they did until now.

In relation to small businesses, Virtual Desktops seem to have made all their dreams come true. It is as if virtual desktop solutions were developed with small businesses in mind. Although virtual desktops have been around since the early 2000s, it is only now that their use for small businesses has made a strong resurgence. 

Benefits of Virtual Desktops

Virtual Desktops are meant to make small businesses agile and flexible by ensuring anytime-anywhere access, and the capability to work uninterruptedly. For a distributed workforce working on a remote or hybrid mode, the ability to deploy a dedicated workspace from any location is vital. When businesses adopt virtual desktops, employees can work from any location using a personal device connected to the internet. All they have to do is sign in using a set of unique credentials for data and applications to become available instantly. 

The following are the factors that demonstrate how Virtual Desktops help small businesses make an enormous impact:

1. Virtual Infra: Virtual infrastructure is not just cost-effective; it can be fully outsourced. With remote desktop services being entirely managed by third-party providers, small businesses need only pay for services they end up using as part of the pay-as-you-use pricing plans. While physical infrastructure warrants in-house IT management and its associated costs, a VDI provider is responsible for the maintenance of virtual desktops. This makes Virtual Desktops the perfect tool for small businesses looking to make the most out of a tight budget and limited expenses.
2. Increased Control: For all businesses, complete control of data is crucial. To prevent unauthorized access and data loss, complete data protection armed with state-of-the-art security measures is the need of the hour. Companies end up paying heavily to implement enterprise-grade security measures that ensure maximum protection against data theft. For small businesses, this is particularly difficult to accomplish on a lean budget. Virtual Desktop Solutions come pre-installed with bank-level security measures to establish 360-degree data protection and control. Incorporating both physical and digital security best practices, many trusted VDI providers treat data security as their topmost concern.
3. Greater Security: Virtual desktops are typically protected within a multi-layered secure infrastructure that deploys such security safeguards as access controls, end-to-end encryption, antivirus software, firewalls, Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS), smart policies, etc. These measures ensure complete safety of both end-user devices and the network.
4. Hyper-compatible: Compatibility is never an issue with Virtual Desktop Solutions because every user is provided with a dedicated Virtual Machine (VM) running any OS they prefer. This means, although Virtual Desktops are accessible from end-user devices, they run independently of the device OS. Thus, Virtual Desktop are truly platform independent. 

The Bottomline

Even without a digital workspace, the benefits of virtual desktops are clear. They reinforce multi-level cost advantages with the qualities of agility and flexibility in the modern workspace that would have otherwise grown stagnant and unproductive. But the reason virtual desktops exist is not only to keep things exciting, but because they have become business critical. Small businesses can now eliminate the need for in-house IT infrastructure, because virtual desktops come in the form of an end-to-end managed service that a third-party cloud VDI Provider would be responsible for. In place of their own expensive IT teams, small businesses can now enjoy world-class IT services for their virtual desktops that do not burn a hole in their pockets.