Quickly realize the full benefits of centralized virtual desktops for branch-oriented financial services without having to create and support your own VDI solution

Branch-oriented financial service, insurance and retail banking businesses have distributed users and offices that can vary widely in terms of the number of people who work there. Many of them have been chartered to implement centralized virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) because of its uptime, security and compliance benefits. However, adopting VDI can be quite challenging:

• Limited scalability: VDI is difficult to manage at large scale because each VDI "island" can effectively support only about 1,000 users. Companies, therefore, need to build out multiple VDI environments, which puts a tremendous management burden on IT staff.
• Location-constrained VDI: The best practice for VDI is to put most resources in one location. However, this can impair performance for users because of remoting problems with screen updates and network latency issues related to accessing information in data centers that are far removed from user locations.
• Space and power restrictions: VDI requires additional data center space and power to handle the servers that house centralized virtual desktops. However, many companies are already at or close to capacity, and even those that aren't may not want to dedicate the budget required for additional capacity, particularly in costly metropolitan areas where many of these institutions are located.

The Desktone Solution

Desktone enables financial services organizations to quickly realize the full benefits associated with centralized virtual desktops, and even greater flexibility and performance, without having to create and support a VDI solution themselves. With subscription-based desktops as a service (DaaS) on the Desktone Virtual-D Platform, you outsource the building, deploying and managing tasks to service providers who already have the data center equipment, networking and real estate needed to handle VDI. The Virtual-D Platform is the only solution that integrates all enabling virtualization technologies into a single, automated self-service platform. Because it is uniquely designed along two tiers (enterprise and service provider), it lets you manage a collection of virtual desktops that is powered by a very large set of physical resources, which are owned and maintained by a third-party.

Branch-oriented financial services companies can realize substantial benefits with Desktone-based DaaS environments:

• Hosting location flexibility: By taking advantage of your service provider's existing network you can choose to leverage data centers – and virtual desktops – that are closer to your offices – regardless of how many people work in each office or where it is located. Desktone-based DaaS also provides you the option of choosing a hosted cloud environment, where the physical infrastructure resides in the service provider data center, or managed CPE, where it is located on your network. Or you can use a combination of both models in order to dilute the risk of where the infrastructure resides. In all cases, the service provider owns and maintains the physical resources, and you manage your virtual desktops.
• Improve data and device security: By using thin client access devices, you ensure that end users can't take data out of office. By centralizing control over your virtual desktop images, you can ensure that users can't install software that could compromise the endpoint. Additionally, if end users inadvertently cause problems with the operating environment, your administrators can easily roll back to good state. And because your data center utilizes a private connection to the service provider's data center, you don't have to worry about compromising security.
• Ensure optimal user performance: Eliminate network latency problems by using service provider data centers that are near your offices. And, because DaaS provides a genuine Windows client environment with multi-monitor and broad application support, users feel as though they're working on rich PCs.
• Balance compliance and user experience: IT departments that are under pressure to ensure compliance and security often opt to lock-down desktops. But, end users demand a rich experience. Desktone-based DaaS enables you to balance IT's requirement for control with end users' performance needs.
• Reduce total cost of ownership: Because virtual desktops are consumed on a subscription-basis, desktops are now an operating expense rather than a capital expenditure that is subject to depreciation. In addition, you can repurpose inadequate PCs for endpoints and double their lifetime, lowering PC refresh costs. And with DaaS predicted to save 10% over internally deployed VDI (and 25%-35% over traditional desktop practices), you can lower your overall desktop IT costs.
• Reduce power and space requirements: In addition to reducing endpoint power requirements by converting PCs to thin clients, you eliminate the need to build out large, expensive and energy-consuming data centers by outsourcing the infrastructure that powers virtual desktops to your service provider.
• Eliminate enabling technology concerns: The core technologies (i.e., servers, storage, network, thin clients and virtualization software) required for VDI exist today. However, with new technologies continually coming to market, many companies hesitate to implement VDI for fear of picking products that may not be adequate in the longer term. With Desktone-based DaaS, you can adopt VDI without worrying about vendor technology changes. Not only is the Virtual-D Platform technology agnostic and open enough to support future advances, the responsibility of evaluating and implementing new technologies falls on the service provider, not on the financial services company. And since your quality of service is determined by your service level agreement (SLA), the technologies underpinning the virtual infrastructure don't affect your business.

To learn more about how Desktone-based DaaS can help your call center operations, contact us at 866-691-5660 or email info@desktone.com.