As you may have seen, last week we released a new survey & report by Enterprise Research Group (ESG) which reveals that organizations currently using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or Desktop as a Service (DaaS) products list cost, complexity, and security as their primary issues with these technologies (you can download the full version of the report for free here). So today, we wanted to share a bit more information about some of the hidden costs of VDI and DaaS that were identified in this research. 
If you’ve researched Digital Workspace solutions, you likely know that the cost of legacy VDI and DaaS solutions are extremely high, especially at scale. And in the “new normal” of the COVID-19 era, you likely need to enable remote access to business-critical apps for far more people than you used to – which can add up to a lot more cost depending on the approach you take to delivering a truly productive modern Digital Workspace.
For example – VDI requires significant investment in hardware, and also requires IT to manage servers, gateways, loads balancers, and other infrastructure (all of which equates to additional cost). And while DaaS sought to disrupt VDI by moving certain aspects of virtual desktops to the cloud, it still relies on the same costly and complex underlying infrastructure.
But what’s interesting is that these traditional ways of measuring the overall cost of a solution – upfront cost of hardware, ongoing licensing costs, cost of management and updates, etc. – don’t even provide the full story of the cost of VDI and DaaS. The ESG survey revealed that there are also significant hidden costs involved in VDI and DaaS deployments as well.
The first hidden cost revealed by this report is the cost of staffing. More than 50% of survey respondents revealed that their VDI & DaaS deployments require more than 10 full time employees (FTEs) to manage the complexity of those deployments on an ongoing basis. Ten employees! That’s an incredibly high recurring, annual cost – and that’s in addition to the already high costs of VDI and DaaS solutions themselves.
The next group of hidden costs that this survey revealed all fall into the “third-party services” bucket. This report reveals that a high percentage of VDI and DaaS products require third-party services either to set them up/configure them or to manage them on an ongoing basis. For example:
- 47% of all VDI and DaaS deployments required third party implementation services just to get the products up and running
- 44% of VDI and DaaS deployments require ongoing third-party managed services to manage and maintain the deployment
- 43% of VDI and DaaS deployments require third-party consulting services
It’s no wonder IT teams are fed up with the cost and complexity of VDI and DaaS. The high upfront cost and the high ongoing licensing costs combined with the large amount of personnel required to manage the deployments AND the cost of third-party services – that all adds up quickly.
Which is one of the reasons the industry is shifting away from VDI and DaaS and towards the cloud-native Virtual Application Delivery approach to enabling Digital Workspaces. Virtual Applicaiton Delivery platforms like Cameyo make it incredibly simple and cost-effective to provide all of your people with access to all of their Windows and internal web apps from the browser so that they have one simple place to go to for all of their business-critical applications.
Just a DaaS disrupted VDI, Virtual Application Delivery is disrupting both of those legacy approaches with a truly built-for-the-cloud Digital Workspace that enables access to all of your business-critical apps on any device, from the browser, without the need for VPNs. Not only does Cameyo provide a superior user experience, but it does so at an average cost savings of 70% less than Citrix. And unlike the weeks & months it takes to deploy VDI and DaaS product, Cameyo can be deployed in hours with no technical expertise required, and without the need for costly third-party services.
Want to see how easy it is to get up and running with Cameyo and publish your first app within minutes? Get started with a free trial here.
Or to download the complete ESG research report, go here.