IT Savings Made Simple

Given the state of the global economy, reduced capital and operational spending has become the order of the day. Many IT organizations will have to make do with tighter budgets and leaner staffs—without neglecting critical IT functions. In fact, IT’s role may become even more important, helping the business respond to changing conditions and compete effectively for a larger share of shrinking markets. First, you must find a way to cut costs and do more with less.

In this series of articles, Citrix explores cost-saving strategies for every part of your IT environment, from the datacenter to the desktop. While the immediate goal is to reduce IT costs, these strategies will also deliver meaningful long-term benefits by creating an agile, scalable infrastructure able to support future business needs, an essential IT priority in any economy.

Part four: Rethink your user desktops
In the first three parts of this series, Citrix explored strategies for reducing costs and improving efficiency in the datacenter, throughout the network and in the way applications are delivered. In this final installment, the focus turns to the endpoint: user desktops. The traditional PC, long a mainstay of corporate life, provides a rich target for those seeking to eliminate waste and maximize limited resources. Desktop virtualization—the replacement of physical desktops with remotely accessed, virtualized versions hosted and delivered from the datacenter—not only allows you to equip your users more efficiently and cost-effectively; it enables a broad range of strategies for reducing cost, improving service, and providing more agile support to the organization. Work and IT functions can be similarlyvirtualized, with collaboration and support moving online. Even endpoint hardware itself merits a new approach, with new types of displays and computers that reduce both capital and operating costs—or Bring your own computer initiatives that shift desktop procurement and management to the users themselves. To learn how these strategies can reduce costs and modernize your IT environment, read on.

Use desktop virtualization to simplify desktop management
Today’s enterprises place a premium on workforce agility: the ability to deploy employees wherever they’re needed, and wherever they can support the business most effectively and efficiently—at headquarters, a branch office, a customer or partner site, on the road, or at home. But this kind of flexibility doesn’t come easily; in recent years, desktop management has become complicated enough even with employees in a single location. Distributed across an ever-extending landscape, it becomes a challenge in desperate need of a better approach.

Users who work offsite pose numerous headaches for the IT organization. Telecommuters who rely on specialized applications must either install them on their home computer—increasing licensing costs while requiring IT to support a non-standard system—or carry a corporate laptop back and forth regularly from the office, risking loss, theft or damage. Work beyond the firewall also makes data and application security difficult or impossible to guarantee. Mobile workers and those in remote locations—including both branch offices and third-party sites—make routine software updates and user management tasks a logistical and scheduling challenge.

Desktop virtualization changes this picture dramatically; no matter where employees are—onsite or offsite—or what device they use, they can securely access the same familiar environment of data and applications. Because routine maintenance and support take place within the datacenter, users are no longer dependent on in-person IT resources and can receive the same high level of service from any location.

By simplifying support for user desktops regardless of location, desktop virtualization enables IT to provide greater agility for the business while maintaining a high level of control and quality. In addition to better supporting mobile and remote workers, the organization can easily expand telecommuting initiatives beyond occasional teleworkers to employees who work primarily or exclusively offsite, conserving costly office space and other overhead. Disaster recovery and business continuity are aided not only by simplified endpoint backup and recovery, but also by the ability to use virtual workplace infrastructure to provide employees with the emergency information, applications, and communications and collaboration tools they need to remain informed and productive. Outsourcing and offshoring become more secure, efficient and easily managed through the delivery of centrally managed desktops. It is benefits like these that are quickly making desktop virtualization the preferred method for supporting users throughout the enterprise in companies of all kinds. More than just a trend, it’s the new face of mainstream IT.

Replace in-person gatherings with Web-based collaboration


The core concept of desktop virtualization—freeing employees from reliance on a specific device or location—lays the foundation for unprecedented flexibility and efficiency in the way users work together. For both IT and other areas of the business, in-person communication can be a costly luxury. Requiring employees to travel for IT training, development sessions, business meetings and other activities not only puts the company at the mercy of high travel costs, it also squanders endless time in transit, impairing productivity. Instead, businesses can host online meetings, Webinars and Web-based training to enable employees to communicate and share information with peers in any location, using any device. Collaborating online reduces costs and improves productivity while making it simpler and more feasible to bring third parties such as partners and customers into the room, further enhancing flexibility. The same applies to employees who work primarily at a client site. Instead of being separated from their peers at the home office, they can continue to participate fully as an integrated member of the team, providing greater value to the client and their own company alike. As with Web commuting, this kind of initiative can enable savings that extend beyond IT into other budgets, underscoring the value of IT innovation for the business.

Provide users with instant, Web-based support
As desktop virtualization and Web-based collaboration enable anytime, anywhere productivity for users, IT staff members need to embrace a similar course. In-person support is cumbersome for onsite employees and even more so for those offsite, requiring busy staff members to waste valuable time en route to the desktop in question and forcing them to work outside their usual work space. The latest instant and secure live support solutions enable IT to deliver high-quality assistance anywhere in the enterprise—onsite and elsewhere—from any location, providing full access and control over the user’s device as well as a full arsenal of problem resolution capabilities. Response times are quicker and difficult problems can be transferred or escalated more easily. Remote support is also highly traceable, enabling IT to capture detailed records of individual incidents as well as aggregated business metrics to identify emerging user trends and needs. By making it possible for IT to provide better service, more quickly and efficiently, wherever it is needed, Web-based support enables the staff to address more problems with fewer resources at a lower cost.

Replace PCs with thin clients
The advantages of desktop virtualization extend to hardware as well. Running desktops delivered virtually from a central datacenter eliminates the need for state-of-the-art hardware or frequent upgrades, making it possible to replace resource-intensive traditional PCs with lower-cost, lower-maintenance thin clients, many of which offer functionality similar to that of higher-end machines. The savings, in both capital and operating costs, can be dramatic: the typical PC costs more than $1,000 with monitor; the price for a thin client is closer to $400—with a life cycle as much as 50 percent longer. Thin clients are also less costly to support, and consume as little as 5 watts of power compared with 50 – 500 watts for traditional desktops and 50 – 90 watts for conventional laptops.

Replace CRTs with LCD displays
The PC isn’t the only resource-hog on the desktop. Energy-efficient Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) are already displacing outdated Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitors in most enterprise markets, and likely already represent the screen of choice for your new and replacement desktop systems—but what about the legacy CRTs still in use in your organization? Replacing them now, rather than waiting for end-of-life, is an easy project that delivers rapid return on investment. A leading personal care manufacturer who made the switch last year realized a net annual savings of 70 kilowatt-hours (kWh), or $191.55, per display—enough to pay for the upgrade in a single year. Over time, this smaller energy footprint locks in continued savings, especially in light of rising energy costs. Meanwhile, users reap the ergonomic benefits of a lighter, smaller screen which frees up valuable real estate in their work area.

Promote employee self-service: Bring your own computer
In identifying IT inefficiencies, one glaring question arises: why should a single user need separate computers for business and personal use? In the past, the answer was simple: because using the same system for both might compromise IT security in terms of data isolation, standardization, software conflicts, support…the list goes on and on.

With virtualization, this is no longer the case. A client hypervisor—software which enables more than one virtual machine to run on a single system—makes it possible to create two entirely separate environments, each with its own data, applications and operating system, on the same computer. This makes it possible to use a single device for both business and personal use—at a much lower cost than buying and supporting two separate systems. By subsidizing part of this cost, IT can provision user devices more cost-effectively while enabling the employee to enjoy the full benefits of a higher-end personal system.

At Citrix, this premise has been implemented in the form of a Bring your own computer program. Instead of being given a standard-issue computer, each employee is given a voucher to buy and maintain any laptop they want. This self-service approach reduces reliance on IT for desktop procurement and management and promotes a more service-oriented approach to IT in general.

Reducing cost by modernizing your IT environment
This concludes series on IT savings made simple. The strategies discussed in these articles should provide inspiration and guidance to help you save money and improve efficiency in every part of your environment, and create a more cost-effective foundation for IT operations in the months and years to come. To refer back to the earlier installments in the series, click here for complete archived versions. You can also find additional information on the technologies discussed on the Citrix website, including desktop virtualization, server virtualization, application virtualization and network optimization as well as the following resources:

• XenDesktop Blogs: Desktop 2020
• Virtual Workplace Continuity
• GoToMeeting Corporate
• GoToAssist