Let’s face it, the future of work is agile, flexible, and digital. In every industry, companies are rapidly shifting workplace processes into cloud and virtualized environments in the quest for better business continuity, enhanced productivity, improved security, and cost efficiencies.
Since the pandemic accelerated the shift towards remote and hybrid work, most businesses can no longer rely on technologies that keep their employees tethered to a specific desk or location. VDI, or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions, have emerged as the ultimate solution to ensure users can access their business applications securely on thin clients from anywhere, without relying on the expensive old-school desktop systems. Vertical industry segments leading in the adoption of VDI include education, retail, and government, and adoption cuts horizontally across contact center workforce to employees spanning both customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX).
Experts predict the VDI market will reach a value of $50.5 billion by 2030, thanks in part to growing demand for flexible, cloud-based productivity solutions. However, vendors helping businesses navigate the migration to the cloud can face issues when effectively implementing, configuring, and maintaining VDI solutions.
Crucial resources, like UCaaS and CCaaS applications, can be more challenging to manage in a VDI environment, as they are often sensitive to network and system performance issues. This places more pressure on vendors to consistently test and optimize VDI solutions.
Talk to a TekVizion representative today about how we can help you test your VDI solutions.
The Challenges Application Vendors Face with VDI Implementation
Enterprise customers can choose from multiple VDI environments, wherein virtual desktops can be managed and run on virtual machines, and deployed on host data centers. These data centers can be deployed either on-premises or in the cloud, depending on a company’s security requirements, budget, and specific needs. They can also be delivered by various vendors, such as VMWare and Citrix, in collaboration with numerous cloud platforms, from AWS to Microsoft Azure.
When implemented correctly, VDI is scalable, comes with predictable costs, and enables advanced disaster recovery and business continuity.
Unfortunately, while there is a lot of flexibility in the VDI market, the wide range of thin clients, OS solutions and tools available from a myriad of vendors can create significant challenges. UCaaS and CCaaS vendors can struggle with interoperability issues, technical restraints, and network sensitivity issues.
VDI solutions are expensive to implement and difficult to maintain without the right expertise. Without careful planning and implementation, application vendors and enterprise customers struggle with:
- Selecting the right infrastructure: There are a myriad of options to consider when choosing VDI infrastructure: deployment models of on-premises vs. cloud, OS to support, end user devices, thin clients, and vendors.
- Inconsistency between devices: VDI is about centralizing the entire desktop infrastructure, so every action from the user device or endpoint relies on communications with the cloud, thus introducing performance and workflow inconsistencies.
- Latency: Running resource-intensive applications can generate latency if a VDI isn’t configured correctly, impacting user experience and productivity.
- Security concerns: Though VDI applications can be extremely secure, attacks are possible when the solution isn’t properly configured and tested.
Undoubtedly, the prevalent demand for VDI along with the high cost of infrastructure, pressures platform providers to deliver a reliable, consistent user experience. Additionally, it is challenging to provide the same quality user experience on thin clients that may not have local resources for the full functionality, and that are sensitive to network and quality issues.
This is where effective VDI application testing comes in.
The Importance of VDI Application Testing
UCaaS, CCaaS, or SaaS vendors striving to deliver an agile and efficient technology experience to consumers require VDI environments to test their applications.
Building and maintaining VDI environments is expensive and requires staffing of dedicated resources. UC and CC providers need to be able to meet their enterprise customers where they are, and deliver solutions that adapt to their specific needs, all while simultaneously growing their business.
Achieving success means committing to a VDI testing process that overcomes challenges like selecting the right infrastructure, ensuring interoperability between tools, applications and devices, and ensuring scalability. Effective testing also ensures UC or CC vendors can adhere to their enterprise customers’ needs for scalability, personalization, and innovation.
Overcoming the Issues of VDI Application Testing
Effective VDI application testing is essential to ensure the continued performance, reliability, and security of an application in the virtualized system. Customers don’t know or care why or how VDI solutions are affecting their services – all they know is the solution “doesn’t work”.
This means vendors risk losing the loyalty and continued support of enterprise clients.
However, maintaining a test environment can be difficult for UCaaS and CCaaS vendors. If testing is not a core skill for the vendor’s team, they may waste time and resources on the implementation of inefficient practices.
CCaaS vendors testing VDI require more than just expertise into UC and contact center solutions. It also requires an in-depth knowledge of network configuration, integration issues, virtualization, performance validation and compliance issues. Fortunately, CCaaS and UCaaS vendors can seek out additional support to optimize their testing strategy.
Working with a third-party testing company like TekVizion allows SaaS vendors to have instant access to VDI, UC, and CC expertise, which is rare to find. TekVizion can streamline and enhance the testing process, optimize costs, and improve efficiency in performing VDI application testing. TekVizion serves countless companies in the UCaaS and CCaaS space, helping them to optimize their VDI solutions, with reliable, consistent testing methodologies and breadth of industry knowledge gained over decades of performing continuous testing as a service.
VDI testing might be complex, but vendors cannot afford to overlook it.
