The technologies and concepts of delivering a virtual desktop have been around for quite some time. However over the past year, Microsoft developed a virtual desktop experience that is more secure, reliable, and cost effective. Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) gained quite a bit of momentum this past year as organizations looked for solutions that would enable employees to work from home while maintaining security, application compatibility and across multiple operating systems. Now as companies plan their post-pandemic strategy, supporting remote work remains a high priority and so does virtual desktop technology.
IDC reports the Desktop as a Service (DaaS) category will grow up to $3B in revenue for 2021. What is propelling this growth? The use case for virtual desktop extends beyond supporting remote workers. Virtual desktop technology has application across highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and government because of the clear separation of data from the endpoint. Elastic workforces also find benefit from virtualization by easily ramping up or ramping down during seasonal employment periods, mergers and acquisitions and supporting contractors. More uniquely, the virtual desktop technology is being leveraged with specialized workloads such as high intensity 3-D design and engineering applications that previously could not run in a virtual environment.
Many customers already own the licensing rights to deploy Windows Virtual Desktop. WVD is a platform as a service that runs on top of Azure infrastructure and clients can create a full desktop virtualization environment in their own Azure subscription without having to run any additional gateway servers. The WVD service supports many operating systems so you are likely to find the appropriate Windows VD client. With the new Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session capability, you can greatly reduce the number of virtual machines and OS overhead while still providing the same resources to the users.
