Reducing costs with endpoint virtualization

There is no doubt that we are living in a period of time that will go down in history as one of the toughest economic climates of the past one hundred years. It seems that around every corner companies are looking to cut costs just to survive. However, one area that has surprisingly not been as affected by cuts as one might have expected is investment in new technology. This is because many organizations are realizing that a troubled economy demands that they move outside their comfort zones and look to new and sometimes unconventional technology alternatives in order to save money in both the short and long term. This is a particularly wise survival strategy right now since many new emerging technologies, such as endpoint virtualization, are centered on the notion of doing more with less.

Doing more with less is certainly not a new trend in technological innovation, but endpoint virtualization is taking the idea and embedding it even further into the enterprise. Endpoint virtualization can be a rather broad category of technologies, but it is actually quite simple when it is reduced down to its fundamental principles. Consider that virtualization in general is simply the separation of one system from another, one software application from another, one bit of information from another. A virtualized system is one which thinks it has hardware underneath, but what is actually running underneath it is just more software. On the endpoint, this means separating the user experience, that which is most important, from the underlying device. Examples of this are application virtualization and streaming and desktop virtualization.

The primary focus of endpoint virtualization is on enhancing the end user experience and on increasing end user productivity—regardless of equipment, connectivity or location—and since end users are the key to creating true business value, this enhanced productivity equals real cost savings. In addition, endpoint virtualization provides IT departments with the ability to reduce maintenance costs through simplification, automation and optimization. Incremental endpoint virtualization implementation can add and create significant savings very quickly, both in real IT costs and gains in recovering lost user productivity.

What follows are examples of areas in which endpoint virtualization can help companies reduce costs.

User downtime due to application conflicts
By using endpoint virtualization to virtualize applications, those applications are isolated both from other programs and from the underlying operating system. Thus, endpoint virtualization eliminates the need for pre-deployment testing, and the processes associated with application deployment, version changes and updates are significantly accelerated.

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