How to Choose a Desktop Delivery Model for the Digital Workplace

Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2025, 70% of organizations that select employees for migration by focusing solely on DaaS features will fail to achieve desired cost savings and fail to reduce required IT resources.

By 2025, over 30% of pandemic-inspired VDI expansions will revert back to physical PCs, due to the ability to quickly deliver and provision a remote worker laptop using modern management.

Introduction

Table 1: Pros and Cons of Desktop Delivery Models 

Source: Gartner (March 2023)

Source: Gartner (March 2023)

Digital workplace leaders must use a multidesktop virtualization delivery architecture approach to exploit the advantages across physical PCs, VDI and DaaS. Table 3 outlines the delivery models where VDI or DaaS is preferred, and where a mixture of the two is optimal. For all delivery models covered in Table 3, physical PCs currently are, and should remain, the dominant desktop delivery model, with VDI and DaaS as a complementary offering.

Table 3: Desktop Delivery Options

Source: Gartner (March 2023)

VDI

Clients with high security and compliance concerns are best served with a VDI delivery model, especially if their organization has not fully vetted or approved public cloud, typically for security, privacy and/or sovereignty reasons. These clients are typically in finance or government. In addition, desktop virtualization workloads should remain in the same data centers if there are back-end application dependencies or if legacy application requirements (e.g., Windows Server 2008) prevent them from moving to the public cloud. Once these back-end dependencies migrate to the public cloud, or legacy applications are updated, modernized, or replaced, then Gartner recommends moving to DaaS.

DaaS

By contrast, organizations are best suited for a cloud-first approach and should use DaaS if they have limited on-premises infrastructure, do not have proximity dependencies and can support modern OSs. 

Most clients that embrace a DaaS strategy:

• Have adopted cloud-hosted collaboration and productivity suites, such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
• Usually have little on-premises VDI or are rapidly migrating workloads.
• Have multiple use cases for production cloud desktop deployment that include third-party (for example, contractor) provisioning, but are also focused on provisioning permanent employees.
• Often have highly variable concurrent consumption demands, and thus can benefit from intelligent workspace provisioning.
• Have the choice of retaining full administrative control, but will increasingly migrate to cloud service providers as dependencies on on-premises workloads diminish.
• Have data center capacity constraints, or are unwilling or unable to invest in a data center.
• Had significant adoption of office-based desktop PCs, and limited remote work options for those workers prior to 2020.
  
  

Hybrid — Discrete Platforms

Some clients may find that DaaS or VDI alone do not fit all their needs. For clients primarily using DaaS, a small on-premises VDI deployment may be appropriate for specialized use cases, including GPU workloads, cost-prohibitive enhanced-application delivery options, higher security requirements, and tighter integration with internal servers and data. For clients primarily using VDI, a small DaaS deployment may be used for noncore, exploratory, and/or tactical use cases. In these scenarios, a single management control plane across both DaaS and VDI is not likely to be desired, practical or cost-effective. In these cases, discrete DaaS and VDI platforms should be deployed.

Hybrid — Extend to Cloud

Enterprise organizations with a large on-premises VDI environment typically look to a hybrid approach to extend their environment to one or more public cloud data centers via DaaS. These solutions leverage a common cloud control plane, typically offered by Citrix or VMware, that run on public cloud infrastructure like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform or IBM Cloud, as well as on-premises data centers. Extend-to-cloud customers retain the administration and management infrastructure, and keep the core of the production workloads on-premises in one or more enterprise data centers.

For desktop virtualization workloads, the public cloud is recommended for:

• Regional coverage (reduce latency by leveraging data centers in proximity to offshore users)
• Burst usage (seasonal workloads, rapid growth — takes time to purchase and install on-premises hardware)
• High availability/disaster recovery (switch to virtual desktops if on-premises VDI infrastructure is down) 

• Are starting their cloud migration journey
• Have significant VDI investment in infrastructure and people (qualified and certified administrators)
• Tend to be larger enterprises
• Use VDI as a mainstream workspace solution
• Focus on high-value, initial cloud workspace use cases, such as expanding to the cloud for high availability or disaster recovery
• Want to fully control the pace of migration and continue to retain administration control of the environment
• Have a significant footprint of back-end application servers that benefit from close proximity to VDI infrastructure
  

Optimize the Desktop Strategy for Today

Higher VDI and DaaS Costs

• The thin-client market is shifting to higher-cost clients as the number of entry-level thin or zero clients are reduced. A number of thin-client vendors are now focusing only on software.
• Work from home initiatives have dramatically increased the use of voice and video, which are better suited for running on higher-cost and higher-end thin clients.
• The remote and hybrid workplace has necessitated a shift from desktops to portable devices like laptops, which typically have higher costs. While a significant price premium exists between mainstream business desktops and desktop thin clients, the cost premium for a thin client laptop versus a business laptop is much smaller.
• Hybrid client software, typically using Linux as the base OS, has emerged to bridge the gap between fully managed thin clients and Windows PCs used as VDI endpoints. This software:
  • Offers local execution of key functionalities like unified communication, browser-based apps and cloud workspace integration with Office 365 and Google Workspace.
  • Has integrated user storage across local, cloud and virtual desktops.
  • Is managed from a single console optimized for a virtual desktop and/or application environment.
  • Typically runs on more expensive business PCs and higher-end thin, rather than entry-level thin clients, because of the increased processing power and storage required.
• Usage of Windows PCs as a virtual desktop endpoint has increased; like hybrid clients, they allow for local execution options that better support unified communication and browser-based apps. However, management is often split between the OS, user and/or virtual desktop environment. This complexity can outweigh the benefits, and often results in clients keeping or migrating to thin and hybrid clients. Limiting the number of supported applications and utilizing Windows 10/11 kiosk mode reduces the management and user burden.
• PCs are minimally impacted by these changes because of a mix shift from desktop PCs to laptops. Most business PCs have sufficient performance, so there is little change with respect to hardware configuration.
  
  

Higher PC Availability and Quicker PC Deployment

• The PC supply chain has stabilized, resulting in increased PC availability.
• The PC market has softened as PC demand has dropped, with digital workplace leaders leveraging PCs already purchased and extending their useful lives.
• With these changes, digital workplace leaders can purchase their desired PC hardware configurations and vendor support requirements, rather than needing to pay more for unneeded features, performance, or reduced delivery times
  
  

Wider DaaS Pricing Ranges

• Most DaaS vendors motivate customers to leverage a subscription model instead of a traditional perpetual license with annual maintenance costs, which potentially results in higher prices. Digital workplace leaders should consider using  BuySmart, which is a trademarked approach for using data-driven insights and situational analysis to inform purchases of VDI, DaaS, and many other software and services.
• Microsoft charges a lower price for Azure Virtual Desktop virtual machines (VMs) than an equivalent Windows VM purchased for general workloads on Azure. This price difference is typically 30% to 50%, but could be over 100% for some VMs.²
• Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop offers Windows 10 Enterprise multisession desktops, which allow several users to share a single Windows 10 VM, resulting in lower costs than VDI or DaaS with single-session VMs.
• DaaS costs are still higher than VDI for many use cases and usage patterns.
  
  

Reduced Management Overhead for Windows Modern Management and DaaS

• Modern management via unified endpoint management tools has reduced overhead and infrastructure requirements compared to traditional client management tools, especially for supporting remote employees. (For more information, see How to Maximize the Benefits of Windows Modern Management and Magic Quadrant for Unified Endpoint Management Tools.) This reduces the need for desktop virtualization for remote workers, as employees can be up and running on their new corporate PCs in days instead of weeks.
• Several DaaS vendors offer additional functionality to reduce operations effort:
  • Simplified effort to expand or shrink number of users
  • Managed virtual desktop images
  • Support for multiple cloud data centers and multiple public cloud providers
  • Custom virtual desktops for specialized use cases
  • Enhanced security access solutions integrated with virtual desktops
• In addition to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), Microsoft has a simplified DaaS offering with Windows 365 (see Windows 365, Microsoft’s Newest DaaS Solution, Demands a Careful Assessment of Costs and Use Cases). While it offers far fewer options than AVD, Windows 365 reduces the overhead for managing virtual desktops by giving each user their own persistent, always-on virtual desktop, paid for on a fixed monthly cost that is based on the VM configuration.