Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

September 10th, 2018

As CIS works with numerous clients in essentially every vertical market, one thing has become quite clear over recent years: the workplace has been forever changed by technology. As remote work becomes a more standard approach, the requirements placed on an IT department change dramatically. Maintaining a consistent secure user experience from the office to the tablet at the airport to the PC at home has become a priority, as more and more people take work on the road or home with them. For many clients with changing working environments, CIS recommends a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment, based on Citrix’ leading VDI solutions.
CIS designs and implements VDI solutions for clients that allow even a single administrator to manage thousands of desktops from a central IT hub, rather than having an entire team of resources going from user to user. Deploying applications and standardizing desktop images, as well as software auditing, are greatly simplified by controlling a distributed version of the same desktop experience, rather than allowing myriad disparate endpoints.
This architecture not only dramatically simplifies management and administration of the enterprise, it ensures that a user will have the same exact experience, the same PC desktop, the same folders and files, regardless of where they log-in. This greatly enhances employee productivity from site to site, and reduces the time spent with technical support. And, since everything runs from the central server or cloud, power users, such as developers, and Autocad engineers, can have fully customizable desktops without worrying about the underlying PC hardware. At the same time, the user data, backups, and settings are all stored centrally, so the need to worry about individual user information is removed. Threats from Viruses, malware, or other endpoint related security issues are also largely negated, as wiping the threat can be accomplished simply by rebooting the endpoint, all critical data and information will be securely restored from the central hub.
While there are several viable VDI solutions on the market, CIS’ experts typically recommend Citrix XEN Desktop, the leading technology in the field. While many factors contribute to this recommendation, the simple fact is the product aligns with CIS’ core value of providing the best possible solution to meet a client’s challenges, at the best possible cost. Citrix leads the way in areas like security, reliability, cost, Windows VDI experience on mobile endpoints, performance optimization, and more.
The CIS team has implemented Citrix’ Xen VDI solutions for large-enterprise corporations, as well as clients with workforces under 50 users. CIS firmly believes that VDI is not only the best way to answer common challenges, but that it is the future of distributed end-user IT services.