Matthew Binder Undergraduate Dissertation 2014/15

A Critical Analysis of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and its Application in Enterprise.

Supervised by A.Simons

Abstract

The rise of the 'as a service' business model for computing has opened the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) market to both public and private sector organisations. Rather than building a complex VDI network, the infrastructure can be outsourced to a 3rd party solution provider. This is known as Desktop as a Service (DaaS). Amazon; Citrix; VMware and Microsoft are some of the market leaders in the industry to be evaluated throughout this report. Each service provider offers fully managed and supported desktops. But which Windows desktop performs to the highest standard, offering the most advantage to a user or enterprise.

The aim of the report is to investigate each of the DaaS providers highlighted above, aiming to critically compare and evaluate their individual service offerings. Their environments will be applied to a number of business use cases to see if DaaS could viably replace their Windows desktop delivery strategy.