CIO Executive Series

Here’s a general look at desktop management from all the respondents in our April 2011 VDI and Desktop Lockdown Crowd Research for CIOES. AD Group Policy was hands-down the most preferred way to manage desktops, reported our crowdsource survey participants. The number of IT leaders participating in the survey who are not managing desktops at all is equal to the number who are using a Third Party Tool to manage their desktops. According to our survey, the smallest companies are not managing desktops at all. Companies larger than 25-100 people are dominantly using AD Group Policy to manage their desktops, although not exclusively. Once one gets north of 100 employees this is when third party management tools start to be introduced but as you can see from the data below maybe not the reasons you might imagine.

AD Group Policy is the preferred Desktop Management Method.

Below you can see that Third Party Tools are really only being used by the larger companies. What is interesting is that a company’s industry type and level of compliance needs has no correlation with using the “expensive” Third Party Systems. We also note that the majority of Third Party Tool Users were additionally the same few VDI deployers. This leads the question to be asked: “which came first, lockdown tools, or VDI?”

Why lock down desktops?  Easier Management was the leading reason for locking down desktops, among all people participating in this survey. Compliance was the second most common reason, followed by cost savings.

These two charts provide a good visual overview of the basic company profiles of the IT leaders who participated in the survey. We notice that zero percent of respondents represented companies with 25 to 50 employees.

Taking a closer look at the profile of our sample of companies. Here we can see a close correlation between the total number of employees in a company, and the number of employees who are computer users. This trend stays consistent, regardless of a company’s size.