Whether you choose remote desktop or virtualization technology for your business model, one thing is clear – you need to understand the advantages of both computing approaches so you know which one works best for you. There is a lot of information on the web that aims at popularizing the newest features and certain company products. But what is the most important for making the most informed decision is the understanding of the differences between the two computing systems and how one actually surpasses the capabilities of the other in real-time.

What are remote desktops?

Remote desktop is a term for software or OS that allows remote access from a personal computer that runs the desktop environment separately from the actual endpoint device. All the user’s applications are running on the terminal servers of the remote desktop provider or on private on-premise infrastructure.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of remote desktops?

One of the most significant advantages of remote desktop services is the simplicity of technology behind the desktop environment. These require less hardware infrastructure and one that is not so challenging to maintain up and running. This certainly can reduce the cost substantially in the implementation stages of a remote desktop project but at a higher expense in terms of functionality. Remote computing technology is notoriously known for the compatibility issues that arise with many applications running on terminal servers. There are solutions these days you can use to work around this problem but this would incur additional costs and potentially more technical issues down the line.

What are virtual desktops?

 

Virtual desktops operate differently from remote desktops by not running applications on the endpoint device or transmitting any data through it. Instead, all the software is run on the hosted servers of the provider and the user sees only a video stream that is generated from the virtual desktop environment. This way, all the data stays completely separated from the end devices on dedicated virtual machines. These desktops require a lot of computing power from big collections of VMs and hypervisors, as well as vast technical expertise to keep up the desktop virtualization technology up to speed.

Benefits of Virtual Desktops over Remote Desktops

 

Virtual desktop environments like VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and DaaS (Desktop-as-a-Service) are far more complex and costly to implement compared to remote desktops environments. However, they have the technical capacity to provide the user with a familiar interface experience, since they would interact with a simple OS (Windows 8, Windows 10, or others) that is running on the data center of the provider. The case is different with remote desktops since they often ask the user to access the desktop environment of the terminal server, which can be challenging for many employees.

Another advantage of virtual desktops over remote desktops is the customization that can be achieved with environments running on virtual machines. Different categories of VMs can be created by the provider to personalize the applications of the departments in every organization. More and different virtual machines can be allocated to your Finance, Human Resources, or Customer Services departments so there is a more seamless experience at the end-user site and a tailored virtualization environment overall. With remote desktops, the situation looks very different. The computing power at the terminal server is split between all the users, which can significantly affect the performance of the applications and the desktop environment itself. There is often latency when a certain number of users access the remote desktop environment simultaneously.

There are a lot more benefits to the cloud and cloud-hosted technologies like DaaS that make this technology so revolutionary in today’s desktop virtualization marketplace.

To find out about our offers and the advantages of utilizing the cloud, get in touch with our team for more information!