As more enterprises begin digital transformation efforts, including mobility, cloud, and big data analytics, the way in which desktops and applications are delivered and accessed is changing fast. Pay-per-use options like Microsoft Azure and other public clouds are becoming mainstream for infrastructure solutions that were once bought as expensive capex investments.

Through these more flexible consumption models, users can provision and consume services as needed rather than have to build and manage them, leaving the heavy lifting to cloud providers that take care of the architecture, maintenance and optimization.

VDI is one solution that organizations are adopting to better take advantage of digital transformation and support the ongoing changes in working patterns. And according to a recent study by IDC, the findings gave a clear indication of why this is becoming a popular choice for moving into the cloud.

To understand the value, IDC compared the experiences of more than 100 organizations that were running VDI workloads either in public clouds like Azure or in anon-premises environment. For those using the cloud, they benefited both from a cost perspective and in terms of user enablement.

On the cost side, moving VDI to the public cloud minimized expenditures on server-related infrastructure and ongoing infrastructure-related costs. In addition, IT teams benefited from not needing to maintain on-premises infrastructure, getting more reliable performance, and ease of delivering new features and applications. Also, through the cloud approach, machines that weren’t being utilized were not incurring costs until they were powered up again.

On the user enablement side, VDI recipients took advantage of improved reliability, faster delivery of new features, better access to applications, and improved performance, all of which helped to generate operational efficiencies and opportunities to capture additional revenue.

In total, IDC’s research shows that organizations that were running VDI in the public cloud couldrealize $2,015 in additional value per-user per-year. Here’s the breakdown of costs: