By Jeff Erlichman

Over the next five years, there is a good chance your work environment will be hosted on a Virtual Desktop.

Ask an IT manager whether they would like to manage 1,000 individual desktop images, each housed on an individual desktop they have to physically touch and maintain? Or whether they would rather manage one desktop “golden image” with various user profiles housed behind the firewall in the data center where applications and security are directed remotely; and updates are downloaded quickly without physical contact? And would they like to lower their overall desktop TCO and reduce annual desktop management costs by up to 40%?

Sounds like a “no-brainer”! Welcome to what the world of the Virtual Desktop promises. 

Pristine Image
Currently some federal IT managers are using Virtual Desktop technology to comply with the FDCC for a standard desktop configuration, to promote green energy policies and to improve security.

Best of all, with a Virtual Desktop they can deliver a pristine, new, completely up-to-date, personalized desktop screen image every day to their customers wherever they happen to be – in the office, at home, at a remote site or on the road as long as they have a broadband connection.

Over the next five years, the Virtual Desktop will become standard fare for government IT infrastructures. After ten years, we will be asking ourselves what took us so long to implement the technology.

Federal Growth
“Virtualization has a lot of advantages,” Mary Powers-King, GSA’s director of GWAC and Schedules told 1105 Government Information Group Custom Media. “I see these things growing and we have suppliers on Schedules and GWACs that can provide these services and solutions.”

“By not having software on each desktop and laptop and having it on the server, it reduces costs and provides better upgrades and security because the server is in one location,” she explained. “Individual users will not have to call an on-site Help Desk with their individual problems, because you can be sitting at your desktop or laptop and have someone in different location helping you.”

Clearly, the trend is to more ubiquitous, more powerful and more portable computing. It’s hard to dispute the way the Virtual Desktop can noticeably improve an agency’s ability to supply staff with powerful new capabilities and applications. And virtualization also adds the ability to move desktop environments and hosted applications as needed for load-balancing.

But it’s not just as easy as “turning on a switch”. Management is the key to making everything work – to balance flexibility with control and collaboration with security.

Expert Collaborators
So, let’s say you want to launch a Desktop Virtualization effort in your agency. What are some of the driving forces you can use to make your business case?

You know you have to show business value in time and cost savings and significant ROI for senior executives and IT management to embark on the Virtual Desktop path.

Desktop Virtualization lowers overall desktop TCO and can reduce annual desktop management costs by up to 40%.

The good news for government agencies is that to make existing terminal services and blade systems work with virtual machines, established providers such as Citrix and ClearCube have developed broker technology to let IT manage the mapping to virtual resources.

Citrix, ClearCube, and Wyse Technology now support the use of VMware and Microsoft virtual machines on blades and other application servers. Citrix, Microsoft and VMware also offer VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure software), which makes server-hosted virtual machines accessible to users through the RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol).

Also right now Systems Integrators such as Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) are offering Virtual Desktop enterprise solutions to agencies; so no matter what vendor you choose you will be choosing a proven expert.

Security Is Driving
Tom Simmons is Area VP for Citrix Federal. In a recent interview with 1105 Government Information Group Custom Media he said that Desktop Virtualization is on the radar screen of senior executives and IT decision-makers for three reasons.

“First, there is security,” said Simmons. “A Virtual Desktop can be part of a strategy for a diskless computing environment and reducing vulnerabilities due to lost laptops and thumb drives.” Using this strategy for example, DOE is using Virtual Desktop applications to eliminate the need for users to have data on “spinning disks”.

Thus according to Simmons, the Virtual Desktop sits behind the firewall and allows users to log in from any environment. Simmons said this solution is also being embraced by the Intel community and the Army.

Unsustainable Spending
Second is expense management said Simmons. One of the main reasons the Army is interested in a Virtual Desktop solution is expense management. Leaders are examining their desktop inventory, their lifecycle and the budgets they have to support these activities and realize that the spending is unsustainable.

“They must find a way to get their arms around that cost,” noted Simmons. Joining the Army using the Virtual Desktop to get their arms around their desktop management costs are the USDA, Treasury and the Justice Department’s Office of the Controller of the Currency (OCC).

Bajinder Paul is CIO at the OCC, where one of his priorities for IT modernization is to ensure that the infrastructure is flexible and agile enough to meet the emerging business needs of the OCC, which insures the safety and soundness of the national banking system.

“As part of the infrastructure and modernization strategy, server consolidation plays a critical role,” Paul said at a recent Federal Executive Forum. “As such the OCC began a very proactive modernization program last year in virtualizing our server environment and also our desktop environment.”

“Fat Client” Fleet
Third is the magnitude of current IT department efforts to manage a fleet of “fat clients” that make up most of government’s desktop environments. Do you struggle to keep up with security patches, OS revisions and application revisions?

With the Virtual Desktop you can begin to rein in a distributed computing environment where the majority of data sits on a laptop or desktop that may be on or off the network. “You can standardize everything in a ‘golden image’ in the data center,” explained Simmons.

“If I want to patch Vista, I patch that ‘golden image’ and I patch all the users with one fix instead of having to go touch every laptop or desktop in the organization.”

Now that everything is behind the firewall, you can develop and test patches in a non-production environment; you can work out the bugs before you put something into production; an you take a huge drain off of Help Desk resources whether they have been outsourced or reside within the agency.

The Beginning Of The Journey
As with any new technology, it is going to take time for the Virtual Desktop to become a natural part of the IT landscape. “If you look at a football field, I’d say with Virtual Desktop we are on our own 20 yard line,” said Simmons.

According to Simmons of the 5 million desktops in government, less than 2 percent are virtualized today and when you look at the opportunities that are realistically available, then 40 percent is a real target.

If everyone would embrace the technology then 80 percent of the users could be using a Virtual Desktop environment said Simmons. “We are just at the beginning. It will be a five year process before Virtual Desktops are thought of as a commodity and a natural way of accessing your workspace.”

Simmons has his eyes out 5 years because at that time the federal government will be in full swing replacing retiring staffers with a generation of workers coming out of college that expect anywhere anytime access. And it is probably going to take 5 years to sort out the security.

Simmons predicts in five years the Virtual Desktop will be an accepted way of doing business in the private sector. “They will work out the bugs and deliver best practices. There will be early adopters in the federal space and they will be the catalysts to change security policies that need to be altered to comprehend a virtual environment.”

Then between years five and ten, the Virtual Desktop will really take off said Simmons.

In 2020
“In 10 years I can see a brand new employee coming out of college into the government workforce,” said Simmons.

“On the first day he/she gets their CAC card and inserts that into whatever client device we are using in 10 years. On the screen are the Welcome Menus and Applications they can access. The whole process takes 20 minutes.”

Each worker has a personalized work environment down to their wallpaper choice. The application suite will be set and fully enabled with HR, business applications, case loads, whatever the individual agency authorizes. The user just inserts their credentials gets full access and they are ready to go to work said Simmons.

“They get their own ‘golden image’.”