On-premises virtual desktop infrastructure was once the only serious option for companies that needed a centralised and managed desktop environment. That is no longer true.
Companies that run a virtual desktop infrastructure in 2026 originally built it to solve a very specific problem at a particular moment in time. A campus needed to provision student workstations with consistent access to software. A financial services firm needed centralised control over a sensitive desktop estate to ensure security and compliance.
Alternatively, a manufacturer wanted to provide shift workers with remote access across multiple sites. The infrastructure went in, and the immediate problem was solved.
The high cost of legacy virtual desktop infrastructure
Building a virtual desktop environment on premises has always been a capital-intensive exercise. Companies must pay for hardware, storage, networking, licences, installation and configuration before a single person logs in. Unlike a consumption-based model, companies commit the capital regardless of what happens to headcount, usage patterns or business strategy.
In South Africa, the economics of keeping these legacy virtual desktop infrastructure stacks on premises are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. A recent analysis of the South African cloud data centres market by Reed Intelligence estimates that operating a data centre in the country can cost more than $1.2 million a year. This cost is driven primarily by electricity prices, which are set to increase as tariffs rise over the next year.
For companies that still run virtual desktop infrastructure on local hardware, every extra rack of servers, storage arrays and hypervisor clusters effectively ties the virtual desktop experience to one of the most expensive parts of the IT estate.
This estate has remained largely unchanged since its inception. Meanwhile, costs, user expectations and cloud capabilities have all moved on.
Another challenge is that virtual desktop infrastructure only scales in one direction: upwards. If your user base grows, you procure more servers and expand your storage arrays. Unfortunately, the reverse is not true. If your user base shrinks or you operate within seasonal demand, your hardware sits idle and the costs remain fixed. This situation limits agility and slows your organisation’s ability to respond to changing business needs. Quite simply, it is frustrating.
Why ownership no longer makes sense
This reality is also why the conversation around virtual desktop infrastructure is moving away from how to manage an estate and towards whether there is any point in having one at all. For a growing number of companies, particularly during the current geopolitically driven economic crisis, the answer is no. Not because virtual desktops have stopped making sense, but because owning and operating the infrastructure that delivers them no longer does.
The virtual desktop experience your users need does not require your company to own a rack of servers. It only requires compute, storage, and networking resources that someone else can run more effectively and at a greater scale.
This is the model on which Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is built. It moves the virtual desktop infrastructure off premises and makes it someone else’s problem. Instead of sitting in your data centre, it sits in the cloud, where someone else runs the servers, compute and storage more efficiently and at greater scale.
DaaS effectively removes the need for hardware refresh cycles. You no longer need to over-provision for peak times. The costs of power and cooling move to the cloud provider, and you can align your licensing more closely with your users rather than infrastructure blocks.
The rise of cloud-based desktop services
It is a straightforward concept with measurable financial and operational implications. Moreover, it changes the nature of your relationship with your desktop environment entirely.
Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop is one platform that makes this model practical at an enterprise scale in South Africa. It runs on the Microsoft global cloud infrastructure and brings highly available and geographically distributed levels of storage and compute to the virtual desktop environment. It is also constantly evolving. The most recent Microsoft Ignite 2025 session highlighted improvements in management efficiency, scalability and connectivity.
Moving to Azure Virtual Desktop has also become significantly easier. Existing desktop images, user configurations, and applications can 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 your environment while they manage the migration and provide ongoing managed services after the transition is complete. The most important considerations are that your move to DaaS remains low risk, incremental and aligned with your business requirements so that operations continue without disruption. Of course, the ultimate goal is to pay less for the same virtual desktop capabilities.
Chris Badenhorst | Head | Azure Core | Data & AI Services | Braintree | mail me |
