Information Technology (IT) is one of the important functions in an organization and is a key value generator. In the current economic condition, there is more pressure than ever before on IT departments to deliver business value, despite challenges such as shrinking budgets, rapidly changing technologies and increasing security issues.

Most organizations invest into single purpose hardware resources such as rich desktops and servers, resulting in a large numbers of underutilized hardware. Additionally, managing such hardware and software takes its own toll on IT departments and impacts deployment, configuration and support. A combination of these challenges can quickly exhaust the IT department’s resources, freezing innovation and proactive planning. Studies have shown that each year IT departments spend more than 70 per cent of their budgets to maintain existing systems, leaving only 30 per cent to spend on new capabilities that add business value. The key challenge for IT is to be able to strike the right balance between managing the organization’s existing infrastructure and adding business value.

Virtualization technologies make it possible to overcome these problems by decoupling various layers of IT infrastructure. By adopting virtualization technologies, IT organizations are able to visualize each layer as a set of logical resources and deploy these resources in an agile and efficient manner. A typical deployment has application, data, operating system (OS) and hardware layers. In a traditional setup each layer is tightly integrated that makes it extremely difficult to adapt to new business needs which often require many of these layers to change. For example, if an organization needs to deploy a new LOB application which does not work on existing desktops due to higher configuration requirements or OS compatibility issues, the IT department is forced to go for desktop hardware upgrade, or rewrite the application. More often than not, these solutions are very expensive from both acquisition and maintenance perspective. Virtualization has the potential to transform the IT infrastructure by optimizing server deployments, faster application deployments, reducing downtime, risks and costs and improving the overall agility of the IT organization.

Presentation virtualization, which is one of the core virtualization technologies, makes it possible to run OS or application in one location while it can be controlled from another. Adoption of this technology unbinds the OS and application layer from the hardware layer. With presentation virtualization, OS or applications are installed and run on centralized servers in the datacenter with screen images being delivered to the users’ machines. The user’s client machine sends keystrokes and mouse movements back to the server. A good implementation of the presentation virtualization technology should provide good user experience on high latency networks and support device redirections such as printers and ports.

Below are some of the key benefits of centralizing desktop & application through presentation virtualization.