Published on the 16/12/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Demand for what amounts to “desktop as a service” continues to mount as enterprises look to offer anywhere, any device access to information – while retaining a level of control…
According to research from MarketsandMarkets this segment is growing at almost 15 percent a year and will be worth $US9.41 billion by 2019.
In Australia, the Federal Treasury is now in the final stages of rolling out a desktop as a service solution to most of its workers, which will allow them to access Treasury data securely from any internet connected device. The solution had a workout during the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook process, and is now ready to be used as Treasury grapples with Scott Morrison’s first Budget to be delivered in May.
The rollout is scheduled to be complete early in the new year.
Treasury’s CTO Ricardo Alberto, said that the decision to move to a virtual desktop infrastructure was taken last year when the agency’s hardware was up for a refresh. It also wanted to address the mobility challenge it had, which was that mobile workers could only be provided access to word processing and spreadsheet applications.
“The vision was to have a desktop that was identical wherever you were,” said Alberto. Adopting VDI also meant that security patching was centrally handled, where in the past “desktops were a key vulnerability.”
Alberto also believes that the VDI approach will allow the agency to become more innovative. For a federal department in the Turnbull era this is essential, as the Prime Minister has given his personal imprimatur to the Digital Transformation Office to shake things up and encourage agencies to take a more innovative approach.
Alberto says that in the past when a new application was built, it would have to be deployed on all the agency’s desktops. “If we rolled it out to 1,500 desktops and there was a problem it would tie up IT for three to four weeks trying to undo the mess. This removes the barrier to innovation,” he said, adding that if a newly deployed application had a bug, the VDI approach simply allowed Treasury to roll back applications to a previous version while the problem was tackled.
He acknowledged however that the migration to VDI – Treasury has selected Nutanix’s hyperconverged platform for its desktop as a service deployment – has not been without challenges.
“The biggest challenge is getting the applications ready to run in this environment.” Alberto said that there were some licensing issues to overcome, while some applications had dependencies on the local C-drive of physical desktops that had to be addressed.
