10 Reasons for VDI Failure and What You Can Do to Prevent it [Infographic]

Siobhan ORorke

There are many benefits to rolling out virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) within large companies: cost savings through streamlining the IT process, enabling easier hardware sharing, ensuring a consistent user experience for each employee, improving mobility of workspaces, improving security accross the company, and many more.

However, no VDI implementation is without it’s difficulties. For all of it’s incredible benefits, installing a VDI company-wide comes with many issues that make the decision to adopt dekstop virtualizaiton a difficult one. First and foremost, initial cost is a big stumbling block for many companies. VDI implementation requires a large initial investment in hardware, as well as software licenses for each user.

There are also issues with the virtualization of certain applications. Most applications, like Adobe Reader, Microsoft Outlook, or security apps, can be seamlessly integrated into a VDI. However, specialized programs that require a lot of modifications or special parameters are very difficult to virutalize. Investing time, money, and effort into virtualizing these applications into a new system is inherently risky; you may find that some of your company’s apps are simply unable to be virtualized. This also causes a major disruption for employees who depend on these applications for their jobs.

The most significant savings from VDI implementation are in IT administration. Because VDI is centrally controlled, you can reduce the number of personnel necessary to manage the IT systems. However, this is naturally a sticking point for many in the IT department – a streamlined IT system also means that your existing team face job losses. Administrator turnover is generally quite high during the VDI transition period, which can negatively impact the success of the transition.

Lastly, getting employees on board can be difficult. Oftentimes, employee resistance is the downfall of VDI projects. It is absolutely necessary to convince key company members of the benefits of VDI and work with them through the transition to ensure that your employees have a forum to voice their opinons, and leaders amongst their teams to push participation.

This infographic focuses on solving the issues brought up by failing to bring the entire company on board. It examines the 10 key stumbling blocks that many VDI implementations face when it comes to keeping people at each level of the company happy, and provides actionable solutions for these issues. Just remember, the key to success is to account for and listen to every user!

Here you can find the original article for this VDI implementation infographic.

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