There are countless articles about the rise of the IT executive as a strategic player whose team enables the organization to pursue its business strategy through technology. That’s all fine and good conceptually, but how do these technology leaders actually grab that seat at the table while the business strategy is being debated and formulated, rather than being the technology “afterthought”? If you live and breathe technology, you know that it just makes good sense for IT to be at the core of strategic planning because technology is the foundation on which a company will achieve a competitive advantage. But sometimes that is easier said than done.

Spring cleaning is a time-honored tradition. It must be an evolutionary phenomenon that humans seem to be like-minded about this; right about this time of year we get the urge to purge – we need to clean out the old and SIMPLIFY! And doesn’t it feel good when it’s all done? Your house, your yard, your garage – they can all use a good scrubbing and a healthy dose of minimalism.  And for all the IT folks out there – the same is true for your data center. You probably already cleaned out all those Exchange servers, right? Now you have Office 365. Looking back, you probably can’t imagine why you hung on to them for so long.  Well, now it’s time to take a good hard look at your desktops and workstations, and get ready to de-clutter.

Anyone who has experience with traditional VDI knows that users suffer with poor performance. It is always worse than physical desktop performance, and it can be particularly bad for remote users. But in the cloud era, the rules have changed. The "new math" that governs virtual desktop, app and workstation deployments means that now you can get better than physical PC performance! But to achieve this, you need to choose the right solution.

What are the words that come to mind when you think about VDI? By VDI, we mean virtual desktops deployed in on-premises data centers:

• Complex to implement, manage, operate, upgrade?
• Slow performance for end users?
• Expensive to buy - lots of infrastructure - servers, storage, networking, hypervisors, etc?

Those are not happy words, but many of you have experienced those things. Let's take a fresh look at what's possible now. What happens when you put your PCs in the cloud? What can it do for you? How do you deploy them? Why would you change what you already have?