Budgetary constraints require doing more with less and IT organisations must find new ways to extend and improve services to take advantage of growth opportunities while containing costs, simplifying processes and reducing administrative overhead. Finally, the explosive growth in the value of information and electronic transactions, requires maintaining the integrity of business processes and intellectual property in the face of escalating intrusion, theft and service interruption threats.
For sometime, the desktop has been an overlooked chokepoint in the drive to overcome IT service delivery challenges. Longstanding choices for hardware, software and network architectures have often inhibited business agility.
Any move to deliver new services to desktop users, or bring enterprise resources and services closer to employees, customers and partners typically adds cost and complexity to an already stressed IT infrastructure.
Attempting to accomplish these tasks with a desktop technology that was never designed with security in mind leaves a company vulnerable. Fortunately, technology advancements and business conditions have converged to enable practical approaches that transcend the limitations of conventional desktop computing.
With desktop virtualisation, there is no configuration, operating system or data to manage on the client device. This offers a secure and manageable solution by centralising the operating system and associated applications that have traditionally resided on PCs, while still providing the same user functionality. Lower TCO/ROI can be achieved through more efficient management, increased productivity, reduced power, cooling, better utilised computing resources and extended desktop lifecycle.
By combining service-oriented architectural principles and open systems networking technology with hardware, software and services based on expertise, organisations can transition end user desktop IT service delivery to a network-delivered competitive advantage.
The Need for a Network- Delivered Desktop
In today’s flexible workplace environment, organisations are looking for ways to provide users with the ability to move from place to place without losing the functionality of traditional fixed asset environments.
Thankfully, technology advancements and economics have converged to enable the creation of a network-delivered desktop able to provide optimised solutions for anytime, anywhere access to enterprise IT resources from any device.
A network-delivered desktop approach can:
- Provide consistent, high availability access to enterprise applications and services
- Reduce IT infrastructure complexity at the architectural, operations and maintenance levels
- Ensure cross-platform compatibility to support a variety of end user devices—both fixed and portable
- Reduce overall cost of hardware and software ownership
- Keep information and business processes secure
Addressing the Deployment Continuum
Today, organisations deploy a wide variety of desktop configurations and consequently have a diverse set of needs for application delivery. Providing access to these applications is not an all-or-nothing proposition—it is a continuum.
At one end of the spectrum, all applications run directly on a local desktop. While popular, this inefficient delivery method requires every machine to be modified when software installations or upgrades are required, making it difficult to keep track of the number, kind and version of applications running on every machine.
An alternative approach enables some or all of the applications—including the desktop environment—to be moved off individual desktop computers and centralised on dedicated application tier servers in the data centre.
These applications, and the desktop environment, are provided over the network. As a result, organisations are better able to take advantage of client device independence, provide true mobility for workers, reduce management costs and keep information secure.
Providing a network-delivered desktop and application set requires sophisticated hardware and software. Desktop infrastructure components become relevant once applications are moved out of the traditional fat client deployment model and into a distributed environment.
Key Benefits
A leader in this area is Sun Microsystems Sun Ray desktop appliance. Key benefits include:
- Reduced cost
- Desktop appliances are more obsolescence resistant, resulting in longer useful lifecycles than a typical PC desktop. Owners can expect a useful life of five to ten years. In addition, these appliances are inherently inexpensive as they eliminate the processor, memory, graphics and storage subsystems included in PCs, laptops and other thick clients.
- Improved reliability
- With less complex designs, desktop appliances contain fewer components. As a result, fewer subsystems are likely to fail. In the event one needs to be replaced, a simple plug-and-play operation is all that is needed.
- Greater session mobility
- Since the user session executes on the desktop device rather than the client device, users can migrate from one system to another and have the session follow their movement. This hot desking capability is possible whether a user moves to the next cubicle or the other side of the world.
- Inherent data security
- Since these systems do not contain disk drives, it is impossible to copy data onto them, or inadvertently erase data that may be required for regulatory compliance archiving.
- Simplified administration
- Administering and managing user access is easier and less expensive than supporting networked or remote access from PCs. All user account settings and access privileges are maintained on the server greatly simplifying the process of adding, moving or changing users.
Thin clients in the Contact Centre
One of the largest cable television operators in the world uses Sun Ray technology in its contact centre which handles more than 150,000 transactions per day. Since its deployment, the company has realised a host of benefits including:
- Reduced customer wait time - from 23 seconds to three seconds
- Improved productivity - with agent productivity rising 30 percent
- Simplified administration - IT staff reporting the effort required to upgrade applications, provide access to new applications, and administer user accounts is trivial compared to the previous generation thick-client based solution.
- Increased operational agility – agents can be quickly reassigned to service different queues or relocate from one work location to another
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