On-premises virtual desktop infrastructure was once the only serious option for companies needing a centralised and managed desktop environment. That’s no longer true, says Chris Badenhorst, Head of Azure Core Services at Braintree. 

Companies running a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) in 2026 originally built it to fix a very specific problem at a particular moment in time. A campus needing to provision student workstations with consistent access to software. A financial services firm needing centralised control over a sensitive desktop estate to ensure security and compliance. Or a manufacturer wanting to provide shift workers with remote access across multiple sites. The infrastructure went in and the immediate problem was solved. 

Building a virtual desktop environment on premises has always been a capital-intensive exercise. Companies have to fork out for hardware, storage, networking, licenses, installation and configuration before a single person has logged in. And unlike a consumption-based model, the capital is committed regardless of what happens to your headcount, usage patterns or business strategy. 

In South Africa, the economics of keeping these legacy VDI stacks on premise are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. A recent analysis of the South Africa cloud datacentres market by Reed Intelligence estimates that operating a datacentre in the country can cost more than $1.2 million a year. This is driven primarily by the cost of electricity, which is set to increase as tariffs rise over the next year. For companies still running VDI on local hardware, every extra rack of servers, storage array and hypervisor cluster is effectively tying the user experience to one of the most expensive parts of the IT estate. 

And this estate has been largely left unchanged since its inception, running in the background while costs, user expectations and cloud capabilities have moved on. 

Another challenge is that VDI only scales in one direction – upwards. If your user base grows, you procure more servers and expand your storage arrays. Unfortunately, the flip side isn’t true – if your user base shrinks or you operate within seasonal demand, your hardware sits idle and the costs stay fixed. This limits agility and slows down your organisation’s ability to respond to changing business needs. And it’s annoying.

It is also why VDI is moving away from how to manage an estate to whether there’s any point in having one at all? The answer for a growing number of companies, particularly in the current geopolitically driven economic crisis, is that they shouldn’t. Not because virtual desktops have stopped making sense, but because owning and operating the infrastructure that delivers them no longer does. The desktop experience your users need doesn’t require your company to own a rack of servers, just compute, storage and network – things that someone else can run more effectively and at greater scale. 

This is the model that Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is built on, moving the virtual desktop infrastructure off premises and making it someone else’s problem. Instead of sitting in your datacentre, it sits in the cloud and someone else runs the rack of servers, compute and storage, more efficiently and at greater scale. DaaS effectively removes the need for hardware refresh cycles, you don’t need to over-provision for peak times, the costs of power and cooling are moved to the cloud provider, and you can align your licensing more closely to your users rather than infrastructure blocks. 

It’s a straightforward concept with measurable financial and operational implications, changing the nature of your relationship with your desktop environment entirely. Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop is one platform that makes this model practical at enterprise scale in South Africa, running on the Microsoft global cloud infrastructure and bringing levels of storage and compute that are highly available and geographically distributed. It’s also always undergoing change with the most recent Microsoft Ignite 2025 session highlighting improvements in management efficiency, scalability and connectivity. 

Moving to Azure Virtual Desktop has also become significantly easier. Existing desktop images, user configurations, and applications move across with the right partner and support – the only thing that changes is the infrastructure layer underneath. You can work with a trusted company to create an Azure Virtual Desktop architecture that fits the environment while they manage the migration and ongoing managed services once the transition is complete. The most important considerations are that your move to DaaS is low risk, incremental and aligned so your business keeps running without disruption. And, of course, that you pay less for the same capabilities.