Over the last couple of years, virtually every CIO we’ve talked with has been committed to lowering, if not stopping, spending valuable resources on maintaining data center infrastructure because frankly, they have more important uses for the money and the people. That realization has been fueling the great migration to the cloud for some time now. Workspot has been helping enterprises with this digital transformation by making it easy to move desktop workloads to the public cloud, and our customers are reaping the rewards in the form of greater agility and flexibility to grow their businesses. Of course, for enterprises making technology decisions, the total cost of ownership (TCO) is always top of mind, and cloud desktop evaluation is no exception. There continues to be significant trepidation about the cost of public cloud compute and the ability to keep it under control. Those concerns extend to the TCO for a cloud desktop solution as well.
In this blog, I’ll compare costs for traditional on-premises VDI and Workspot cloud desktop solutions so you can get a feeling for the cloud VDI savings that await. Then, you can go to our handy calculator to compare the two solutions using your unique inputs. If you are considering an on-premises virtual desktop solution, or if you’re thinking about shutting down your current on-premises VDI solution and moving to the cloud, the calculator will give you a sense of how much you can save with cloud desktops compared to legacy, on-premises VDI.
Cloud VDI Savings: Workspot vs. On-premises VDI
The complexity and time involved in planning and deploying on-premises virtual desktops is a well-known problem. Even more vexing however, is that once deployed, organizations requiring virtual desktop flexibility to accommodate a fluctuating number of users or application workloads run into trouble. IT admins face a constant trade-off between performance versus cost when planning data center capacity for their virtual desktops. As a result, on-premises VDI ends up being over-provisioned to meet peak demand, because maximizing application performance, and hence user productivity, is paramount for any organization. Workspot has solved this problem for IT, so these difficult tradeoffs are no longer necessary.
In our view, determining desktop TCO involves examining four major cost categories:
Hardware Costs: This includes all hardware required for a centralized on-premises infrastructure – compute servers, storage, database hosts, license servers, networking hardware and all related hardware maintenance. We also consider the cost of data center power & cooling.
Software Costs: Here we include all software required to build a VDI environment including gateway, SQL server and VDI software.
IT Personnel Costs: This includes all VDI related IT personnel costs including help desk, server, storage, networking and VDI admins.
Setup Costs: Typical on-premises VDI set up requires expensive 3rd party consultants who charge upwards of $200/hr and take up to 9 months to deliver your first desktop.
For comparison, Workspot offers a turnkey service that covers the cost of your compute, storage and networking. Additionally, all Workspot deployments include setup, proactive tier 2/3 support, better security, and reduced desktop management overhead (you’ll have a single console that manages everything globally – it’s really simple!) – leading to a reduction in overall set up and operational costs.
Workspot customers have reported up to 30% savings on an annual basis. Below is a cost comparison estimate of a 1,000-user on-premises VDI deployment with a comparable Workspot deployment:
And when you begin calculating savings, these hard costs are only one part of the picture. The indirect or “soft costs” are critical to consider as well. I’d be glad to have a more detailed discussion about the value of strategic benefits in addition to a hard cost analysis.
Bottom line? Workspot invented a solution to the problem of complex and costly desktop management. We packaged all that innovation into a turnkey service that is simple to deploy, manage and scale – across public cloud regions globally. Our cloud desktop prices are inclusive of cloud compute costs, Go-Live deployment services, and support. Interested? Schedule a demo to learn more, and be sure to ask us about security and enterprise-readiness too (among the many Workspot differences!).
