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BYOD and VDI: A marriage made in complexity heaven
Of all the challenges faced by today’s increasingly under-fire CIOs, perhaps the greatest is managing the increasing proliferation of mobile devices in the workplace. Today’s IT departments have never been under more pressure to deliver value to the bottom line, through increased efficiency and productivity in the workplace. By Paul Coates, Regional Vice President at Riverbed UK & South Africa.
THERE’S NO DOUBT that the move towards Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in recent years, driven by increased adoption of powerful mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones, has caused a number of well documented headaches in this respect. However, what’s perhaps less well known is the extent to which it can also cause even greater challenges by adding layer upon layer of complexity to virtualised environments.
The BYOD/VDI challenge For many organisations, the only way to get to grips with the BYOD phenomenon is to implement virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) programmes. As many CIOs will tell you, it’s a common and logical path to a secure BYOD policy that ultimately reduces costs and the need for additional resources. Of course, and despite the fact that these programmes are usually implemented with a view to saving time and expense, the issues they can cause to an organisations’ IT infrastructure can be significant.
There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the biggest problem is that testing time prior to deployment is always finite and often limited. This may sound like an obvious point to make, but it does mean that it is impossible for an organisation to introduce a virtualised environment that has taken into account all potential pitfalls and challenges.
Because the testing period prior to deployment cannot, for this reason, ever be 100 per cent accurate, many organisations don’t factor in the extra expense – both financial, and in terms of time – that adding this into the mix can provide. All too often we see CIOs
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having to pay extra or spend more time to troubleshoot unforeseen difficulties or issues, simply because they weren’t able to anticipate them at the testing stage.
Greater complexity
Of course, there are a number of reasons why these problems can occur, not least the fact that the complexity that BYOD brings to these environments can be staggering. Almost overnight, a company can see twice as many devices brought into their environment, requiring more support for more diverse form and operating factors than were ever required before. The knock-on effect of this is that IT departments also have to worry about how their network is performing under this increased strain.
Clearly, network management in a VDI environment is a key concern for CIOs as it means that business critical applications are increasingly accessed via the virtual desktop. As a result, the IT department must plan and manage how BYOD converges with the virtualised enterprise. In order to achieve this, it must ensure high availability of applications and all resources required by end-users, at the same time as providing secure data protection. All of which adds yet another layer of complexity!
To maintain control of each of these different elements, IT organisations require a significant
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