Over 30 percent of organizations need daily specialist support on virtual desktop issues

A new survey of 1,000 front line IT workers from Nexthink finds that 31 percent of organizations have daily virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) problems requiring specialist intervention.

A further 40 percent are having issues on a weekly basis, as level one and two support staff are often unable to manage the complexity of VDI.

Further complicating things is the fact that a substantial proportion of these escalated issues are not necessarily specific to VDI. Application functionality failures (54 percent) and slow performance (47 percent) account for two of the top three most reported issues to IT teams, neither of which are necessarily related to VDI.

"What this shows is that, while VDI has a lot of potential advantages around scalability, accessibility, and security, most organizations still aren't able to reap those benefits," says Samuele Gantner, chief product officer at Nexthink. "A key issue is that delivering a desktop is only one part of making VDI work -- users also need seamless access to applications and data. Therefore, for VDI to be successful, it must work in harmony with dozens of external elements. The problem is that businesses have little to no visibility into how those integrations are working, so, rather than being able to identify root causes, they simply blame VDI and the cycle continues."

The study shows 92 percent say employee experience is an important consideration when choosing a VDI solution, however, 91 percent admit that cost considerations trump performance when choosing a provider.

Although 95 percent believe that VDI offers an equal or better experience than desktops 92 percent admit that it has primarily been designed to make life easier for IT, rather than the end-user.

“Ultimately, IT teams are in a lose-lose situation right now," adds Gantner. "They're accountable for the experience delivered by VDI, but they're not being given the tools to effectively manage and improve it. And without the ability to answer core questions such as; who is being affected, what is the source of issues, when did issues start, and is there a wider pattern, IT is always going to be playing whack-a-mole while continually being blamed by the rest of the business."

The full report is available from the Nexthink site.

Image Credit: Elnur/Dreamstime.com