Most Enterprises Use Desktop Virtualization
Essential Windows applications and Mac computers are constantly crossing paths in day-to-day business. More and more companies are permitting or encouraging their employees to use Mac devices in the workplace. At the same time, many applications are still available exclusively for Windows. Companies and their IT departments can choose from a wide range of diverse solutions and approaches to make Windows applications available for all systems. In a survey entitled “Mac Use in Small- to Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs)”, IT managers reveal how they are confronting this challenge. 42% of enterprises surveyed say that they use desktop virtualization as the main solution for making Windows applications available to their employees on Mac devices. Applications like Parallels® Desktop for Business represent the most popular method. With these, the virtualization solution is installed directly on the host–in this case, a Mac device–and runs Windows, together with the required applications, as a guest system. VDI solutions like Microsoft RDS or Citrix come a distant second with 33.7%. In third place are “Other” solutions, while remote access to a physical PC places fourth–with a share of 15.7%.
Benefits of Native Desktop Emulation
The greatest benefit of local virtualization directly on the client is that there’s no need for the IT department to provide a complex and costly infrastructure to host the virtualized desktops (virtual desktop infrastructure) and applications in the data center. Instead, users access the programs they need directly on their workplace devices, which aren’t dependent on fast, reliable network connections. A direct, uncomplicated solution like Parallels® Desktop for Mac Business Edition is ideal–especially if the enterprise only uses a small number of Mac devices. In this case, there is no overhead in the form of maintenance costs or infrastructure business. Yet another benefit is that applications can access the full processing power of the host Mac device and are not limited to virtual CPU cores in the data center. This can be hugely beneficial for graphics-intensive applications.
Even though an increasing number of companies are making Mac computers available to their employees on a large scale, the survey indicates that the majority (54%) of enterprises surveyed use just 20 Mac computers or fewer. It seems that Mac computers still tend to be the exceptions in most companies. In this case, a single desktop solution is much more efficient than a data center-based alternative. That’s because Parallels Desktop for Business does not require a server landscape or an expensive corporate license for the virtualized environment. Instead, businesses only pay for what they need–individual licenses for every Mac device on which they want to run Windows applications–and nothing more.
Which approaches do you use to make Windows applications available to your employees? Let us know in the comments.
Download a free trial of Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition.
