India is the fourth largest market for VDI in the world

Mobility is the lifeline of any new age organization. Employees are demanding the flexibility to work on-the-go and enterprises are increasingly looking for flexible IT infrastructure solutions to make this possible. On these lines, Milind Yedkar, General

Tell us a bit about the evolution of VDI.

A notebook is self-sufficient. It can be used as a stand-alone system, even without internet. We call it a fat client. So ideally, one can work on mails without internet and then connect it to send or receive mails. But this system has risk associated with it. The integrity of the data in a fat client can be disrupted. It is vulnerable to theft, hacking etc.

But when the same system is centralized, say, a data centre, the encryption or protection is multi-layered and stronger than a stand-alone OS in a fat client. The concept of DV (Desktop

Virtualization) is not new but technology takes time to catch up. VDI is part of DV.

What makes VDI so important in the case of a modern enterprise?

Microsoft is releasing updates and patches frequently and for a large organization, to install those updates on every machine (thick client) is a big job. It gets expensive to maintain and update assets in that environment. But in a VDI environment the maintenance becomes much easier and cost effective because everything is in one place. For instance, a bank in Australia doesn’t want to maintain office space. They hate travelling to CBDs. From the aspect of quality of life, a work-from-home suits them. In this case, I will not give them laptops with data in it (fat client) but a thin client, which works regardless of their location. If they have a client meeting, they take their laptop and access information from there (without taking risk).