Most enterprises struggle with the significant cost of supporting their desktop environments. Operating system and application upgrades, patches/fixes, virus management and requirements for new applications continue to burden the CIO's budget.

For the past several years, organizations have pursued numerous measures to control costs and maintain security, such as improved processes, application release cycles and established policies, to prevent end-users from installing their own applications.

Yet business user expectations continue to apply pressure, impacting both costs and security. They continuously demand rapid access to new services and the ability to be more autonomous. They want to "pick and choose" and install applications on their own without "big brother" IT getting in the middle.

This do-it-yourself, on-demand mentality stems from how they can control the environments of their personal mobile and tablet devices. They can visit the "app store" to search for an application, install it and benefit from it almost instantly with no impact on any other applications. Users now expect the same type of freedom when they are in the office using company-provided desktops.

The implementation of desktop virtualization technologies answers both the IT department and business users' needs—providing a needed balance between maintaining IT security and costs and providing a on-demand user experience. By virtualizing all applications and delivering them in a virtual desktop session, applications run completely independent from one another—similar to how they do on an iPad. Providing users with an "application store" allows them to pick and install corporate applications—and other approved applications, such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter—with no impact to any other application in the environment.

VDI changes the desktop/end user device paradigm by eliminating the significant application interdependencies that require strict controls over the desktop. Now enterprises can offer end users the freedom to self-manage the applications they need or want, while ensuring the enterprise's data is secure and available.