IT modernization: The risks (and cost) of sticking with the same old EUC strategy

What’s the cost of continuing to use outdated legacy end-user computing (EUC) solutions and strategies? It’s a question on the minds of many CTOs as organizations adjust to a post-Covid 19 economy dominated by hybrid, cross-border workforces requiring secure, compliant, and flexible tools to be most productive.

Unfortunately, however, most legacy virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), desktop-as-a-service (DaaS), or virtual private network (VPN) solutions (combined with shipping laptops) weren’t built for the post-pandemic world’s new, hybrid workforce. As organizations adjust, their legacy EUC solutions struggle to do the same – stifling innovation and adding needless support costs, complexity issues, and security problems in the process.

But these costs are just the beginning when it comes to the negative effects of outdated EUC solutions.

Legacy IT spending and complexity inhibits growth

Bloated IT support costs; larger IT headcounts; outsized amounts of time and effort spent on solution implementation, patches, updates, and laptop refreshes/imaging; and the opportunity cost of onboarding new vendors, employees, or even clients in a timely manner are just some of the costs organizations face under inflexible, slow-to-value legacy systems.

Legacy EUC solutions often require costly maintenance and specialized IT resources (also costly). Traditional VDI and DaaS require significant investments in hardware infrastructure which must be maintained, upgraded, and eventually replaced. That’s not to mention the complexity of managing licensing agreements among several different service providers (legacy systems require additional tools for identity access management, vendor automation workflows, network segmentation, security, and compliance, which also adds technical complexity), or security risks of shipping laptops.

The CapEx-based financial model of most legacy systems also means organizations have to pay large up-front sums to initially purchase, upgrade, or scale the solution to meet future demand.

Exposure to disruptions or disasters

Outdated legacy solutions hold potentially severe implications in the event of disruptions, disasters, and other emergencies. Organizations need the flexibility to deploy and scale EUC solutions on a dime in the face of fast-moving potential global economic risks, political instability, security threats, and even military conflicts. Global talent is just that – global – and the talent you require can be located anywhere, including distressed regions with unreliable internet infrastructure. Unfortunately, traditional DaaS and VDI struggle to provide satisfactory user experiences for users connecting via slow networks in remote and other regions.

Modern EUC solutions must be able to handle any eventuality so organizations can leverage specialized talent from any region, at any time, with zero IT security or compliance issues.

Legacy solutions have difficulties meeting modern business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) standards, as well. Traditional DaaS and VDI struggle to provide an on-demand, backup virtual workplace along with secure, compliant remote access to corporate systems in a disaster. They’re also an IT security risk: Traditional VDI and DaaS don’t come with built-in firewalls, malware protection, and identity access management (IAM) tools, and normally rely on conventional security models (which assume everything inside the network is trustworthy). That’s an outdated notion in the age of Zero Trust architectures, leaving enterprises exposed to an ever-growing array of modern cyber threats.

You can’t attract top talent outside your region

Global talent pools are now a go-to talent source for companies, but competition – especially for highly skilled, technical resources – is fierce. Without a secure, compliant, and fast-to-deploy remote work solution offering improved user experiences, it’s much harder to attract and retain top talent from any region. That goes double if, as is the case of legacy DaaS and VDI, the onboarding process takes months.

Legacy DaaS and VDI are notorious for taking a lot of time and effort to implement – and, once implemented, these traditional systems can also take weeks to onboard new employees or vendors. That doesn’t exactly add up to an agile organization able to quickly react to global realities, market fluctuations, and opportunities. Many potential vendors and employees face a long, convoluted onboarding process under legacy systems, including negotiating security, compliance, and access; verifying background checks; creating work environments; and verifying access controls.

That’s simply unacceptable in a business environment where speed and time to value is crucial.

Your workforce is tethered to their office device

Traditional EUC approaches have trouble accommodating bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies: Implementing a BYOD policy using outdated EUC solutions can be a “nightmare.” Most traditional VDI and DaaS implementations reside inside the network perimeter (making BYOD a security risk when connecting to insecure devices).

Modern enterprise DaaS solutions allow any employee to use any device securely, because anything on these devices isn’t translated back to the data center.

You’re giving your competitors an easy advantage

Competitors who have implemented modern EUC strategies are likely just fine with your use of legacy systems, because it means they have the advantage. That’s due to all the reasons we’ve previously mentioned – but especially because traditional DaaS and VDI systems are limited in their ability to scale quickly based on demand.

Physically shipping laptops to hybrid workers across the world leads to similar problems, plus a few more: It’s costly and slow to implement, it’s not secure, and it’s challenging to manage (plus, having to retrieve laptops from former employees can be a real pain).

Legacy architectures of all types are also often difficult or impossible to reconfigure without huge monetary and time investments in compute, storage, and networking. Not making these investments can mean seriously degraded desktop performance, which can have a direct impact on your ability to compete globally and retain global talent. Your competition loves that.

Modern enterprise DaaS as your next EUC strategy

Tehama’s next-generation, enterprise DaaS was built for the hybrid workforce. It allows organizations to rapidly onboard, manage, and scale hybrid teams with no additional tooling or add-ons required for security and compliance, providing hybrid workers anywhere with a reliable, secure, high bandwidth, low-latency connection to cloud and other mission-critical systems.

Its secured and isolated end-user compute environment, centralized management, and dynamic, one-click updates across all virtual desktops – as opposed to manual changes and re-imaging of dozens of desktops, one by one – is also a massive time-saver for IT and other employees. That means no more waiting for purchases to arrive, laptops to ship, configurations to be made, or complex vendor tool integrations.

And Tehama’s per-desktop pricing and real-time system visibility gives enterprises a much better idea of the true costs of scaling to meet future demand, helping organizations deploy an agile FinOps IT financial management model.

Contact Tehama today to book a demo and learn more about how your organization can benefit from a modern, next-generation EUC strategy for the hybrid workforce.