Dear Bob ....
I'm a CIO in county government, and we are moving toward a virtual desktop infrastructure. I just read your recent column, "Encourage innovation? What does that mean?," which is why I'm writing.
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I've never been a big fan of locking users down and have fought it throughout my career. VDI presents a new challenge because by their nature, they are more locked down then a traditional desktop.
However, I am really looking for ways for users to utilize those other devices, such as tablets and smartphones, and VDI allows for that to happen. We are looking at tablets for inspectors, emergency management personnel, probation officers, and even utilizing them in patrol cars. The costs are so much less than providing those same users with a laptop, and we can give them their office desktop experience on the road.
This has also raised the question: Why not let them use their own tablets if they want? Do I really care that it's not county owned if they are securely connecting to their virtual desktop that is centrally managed by my IT staff?
Just wondering what your thoughts are on VDI and how it impacts user innovation?
- Want to, but can I?
Dear Wants to ...
Thanks for giving me a chance to get back on a favorite soapbox. My opinion: Depending on how you implement it, VDI can give you, if not the best of both worlds, at least a lot of it. That's because when you implement VDI, you have the opportunity to provide two (or more) computing environments on a single device.
For example, by deploying VDI on a laptop, you can provide both a highly secured, locked-down, as-impenetrable-as-you-want-to-make-it virtual machine and a user-accessible, free-for-all-style underlying physical machine. Your users can innovate to their hearts' content there, and if one of them messes up, you restore their physical machine to a pristine build without worries.
