In this blog post
VDI – One Vaccine for All Remote Working Variants
As an organization bracing yourself for the long haul of hybrid working, we are certain you are either planning on a desktop/laptop refresh program or looking for long-term solutions for your digital workspace needs. Desktop Virtualization is a powerful solution for the needs of a digital workspace. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) are types of Desktop virtualization. Given the new normal, Gartner forecasts that DaaS users will grow by over 150% between now and 2023!
GAVS Technologies hosted a webinar on the capabilities of VDI/DaaS and their suitability for remote work models. The insightful session was moderated by Mr. Rajiv Kanna, VP – Customer Success at GAVS. The speakers were: Mr. Muralidharan Vijaykumar, Senior Technical Manager at GAVS with over 15 years of experience in product development and product management; Dr. Haider Ghazanfar, Chief Resident for the Department of Medicine at Bronxcare Health System, New York who shared his experiences with VDI technology; and Mr. Greg Dietrich, VP – Customer Success at HiveIO Inc., who has rich experience in global engineering solutions, specializing in implementing and managing VDI for customers.
This blog captures some of the key discussion points and takeaways from this webinar titled ‘VDI – the only vaccine for all remote working variants!‘ The link to the entire webinar is available at the end of the blog.
Technology in Healthcare
The last few decades have seen significant advancements in the field of medicine. There are increasingly advanced investigation and treatment options that have improved the quality of life and longevity of patients. Technology has given healthcare providers consolidated patient information at their fingertips – something that was not possible with paper charts. The availability of this data has resulted in considerable improvement in quality of care, patient safety outcomes, and meaningful interactions among care providers for holistic treatment of patients.
With the use of EHR and EMR, the healthcare industry (like all others) is becoming more and more reliant on technology to support patient care. Being a time-sensitive industry, any delays that affect performance or quality of care can have a ripple effect impacting the patient and the healthcare organizations involved.
However, since the onset of the pandemic, there has been a significant jump in the adoption of VDI. It has changed the way members interact with their payers and providers. Having experienced the advantages of VDI firsthand to handle the virtual care needs of the pandemic, the industry has embraced VDI with open arms to provide telehealth and to prevent delays in care.
Understanding VDI
Typically, traditional infrastructure has physical desktops that function with the help of servers and multiple other moving parts. There is a high dependency on the hardware capabilities of the entire setup. Data transfers between local sites and servers can impact performance of critical healthcare applications. The high-level idea behind VDI is to move everything from local servers to central locations. As a result, everything is managed from a single central location. This centralized management is advantageous in many ways including easier administration, better control, reduced costs, and high scalability.
Application virtualization differs from desktop virtualization in that, only the specific application is virtualized. The user still needs a desktop to perform other activities. In desktop virtualization, the entire desktop and the desktop Operating System (OS) are virtualized. The user only needs a dumb terminal/ endpoint device to access the virtual desktop.
Although VDI has been around for decades, there is an industry perception that VDIs incur high capital costs and are complex to manage. However, emerging players such as GAVS’ VDI/DaaS solution zDesk have moved away from legacy approaches to creating more easy-to-install, cost-effective VDI solutions for industries such as healthcare.
zDesk vs. Traditional Stack
zDesk is an all-inclusive, integrated desktop virtualization platform enabling a secure and unparalleled end-user experience, that can be packaged with hosting and managed services. In a traditional stack, there are multiple layers that need separate installs for feature management and dedicated hardware for the management layer. These stacks also have complex architectures with separate licenses to enable different features. zDesk leverages a zero-layer architecture, where every layer of a traditional VDI architecture, such as the hypervisor, orchestration layer, and software-defined storage, is integrated and included in every single install and license.
While zDesk costs much lesser than a desktop, it offers more secure mobility, scalability, and simplicity.
As an integrated solution, zDesk creates a single point of access for servers eliminating the need for separate management, hardware, or infrastructure, thereby reducing licensing costs, facilitating scalability, and minimizing access time. Offering complex capabilities with simplified adoption, zDesk can be used to improve the bottom line of any organization. And that’s not all – driven by the power of AI, zDesk can self-monitor and self-heal!
GAVS’ healthcare customers have experienced a big improvement in provider productivity and enhancement of provider-patient interactions. For instance, in a large hospital in New York, doctors trying to access patient records in their traditional desktop setup had to wait at least ten minutes between each patient session as applications took a long time to open. This affected patient interactions and patient satisfaction rates. However, with GAVS’ zDesk implementation, the hospital improved user experience as patient records were easily accessible with minimal retrieval time. Evidently, this rapid access to desktops from various clinical areas has given doctors the ability to view patient records from anywhere within the premises and offer better quality of care, especially critical care. Healthcare players also witness a reduction in operation and licensing costs and are HIPAA-ready. Built on a distributed architecture, the solution has also proved to scale effortlessly. You can find more information on zDesk here.
This blog offers only a high-level gist of the webinar. You can watch the entire discussion, including the poll questions, and the experts’ take on audience questions here.
GAVS periodically organizes insightful webinars with GAVS’ tech leaders, the leadership team, and industry thought leaders to explore current and emerging trends. To watch any of our webinar recordings, please visit https://www.gavstech.com/videos/.
