First please let me apologize, sorry everyone, I have been tied up performing Production Roll-outs of VDI. It’s been a busy year and I am seeing more and more organizations move from Pilot to Production on their “Journey to the Cloud”. I feel there should be ominous music there.

The truth is VDI is becoming a mainstream idea, and it’s not just the cost savings of the life cycle extensions or the ease of management. I honestly believe it is more of a keeping up with the competition, as businesses begin to adopt a technology other businesses in the same market space will adopt the same or similar solutions to not lose any advantage.

To be honest I am an IT guy first and have only been looking at the business aspect of things for the last few years but it’s amazing to see how business drivers impact IT decisions. I wrote an article previously that expressed my belief that IT Directors and CIO’s could drive organizational change if they defined the verbiage. I am now starting to believe that my opinion will be ever evolving. Business cases whether sound or based off of what the other guys are doing will help to drive initiatives. It’s up to us as the IT resources to help and guide that initiative to meet our goals for our IT organization.

All of this makes planning and road mapping so critical to success, if you know where you want your organization to go, or have been told what the 5-10 year objective is. Than it’s time to sit down with a trusted IT adviser or advisers and put together the way forward. You may find that there are technology considerations that will impact you in year 3 that you can plan for now. A great example would be profile management. If your organization intends to deploy VDI in the future but are currently working on upgrading end user devices to newer PC’s with Windows 8 and you are moving off of Windows XP how will you make the user profile migration seem less? Will you lay the building blocks now to have a portable profile solution that will be flexible enough to move from your current solution to your future solutions without a great deal of effort.

Decoupling users and servers from physical devices is the “cloud” experience that everyone wants, it makes deployments faster easier and cheaper, the three points of the tri-force that no one ever seems to be able to get their arms around. It all comes down to planning, what may not be easier or cheaper now, will make things easier and cheaper in the next cycle. All we have to do is guide our organizations and show them the savings and a visual road map of what their goals and our are and how we get them there.

So how does your organization plan for the future?

Next post back to VDI and a Production roll out.