by Barry Murphy
Too often, search is taken for granted. When I first started doing research on eDiscovery in the cloud, the prevailing attitude was, “as long as information is searchable, eDiscovery is taken care of.” Sadly, many organizations have learned the hard way that it is not that easy. There is much more to search than meets the eye. But, most organizations do not figure that out until it is too late – until search does not work in the desired manner or at the required speed.
eDiscovery is not the only area where search is overlooked and becomes an issue. In fact, search is a critical function for today’s knowledge worker. Despite the importance of information access, unified search of workers’ most critical assets (email, files, desktop content, and SharePoint) is not always a huge requirement of IT organizations. It is to end-users, however, and that is one of the reasons that X1 has had such success with the Search 8 product – it has a user-friendly interface that provides simple, fast access to the information assets users need the most.
The lesson that I have taken away from being involved in the search market is that search as a standalone application may not seem sexy, but it provides a real return on investment. It also allows organizations to ensure that investments in other technologies are optimized. This fact can be seen especially in virtual desktop (VDI) environments. Desktop virtualization promises many benefits: lower IT costs; streamlined administration of IT assets; and end-user flexibility in terms of accessing the desktop from anywhere. Given the popularity of BYOD, the consumerization of IT, and the need for mobility to support telecommuting, VDI is becoming more and more important.
It is the little details of IT projects, however, that can have big impact on results. Some organizations find that the cost savings anticipated from VDI are less than expected because of high disk resources necessary to support Windows indexing on the virtual desktop. Or, best practice is followed and Windows indexing is turned off – and then users are unable to search for information on their desktops. There are two possible outcomes from this, and both are bad: either users are rendered unproductive because they cannot easily find information or they simply reject the virtual desktop and find ways around the system.
In order to ensure that VDI deployments meet expectations, organizations can build unified search into requirements early on. At the very least, this will help to ensure that end-users are more receptive to the virtual desktop and allow them to remain productive. Getting end-users to buy in is often half the battle when deploying new technology. As I mentioned, though, search is often an afterthought – an issue that only comes up after a VDI deployment where end-users complain or reject the solution outright. That is why it is important to make search a requirement early on.
When it comes to VDI environments, a good search solution must decouple the search UI from the indexing service. Otherwise, indexing will require virtual desktop computing resources and cut into VDI cost savings. The goal is to minimize the RAM usage and search client footprint on the virtual desktop. It sounds simple, but traditional search solutions are not architected for this. We at X1 are doing a webinar with Citrix on this very issue – enabling lightning-fast search in VDI environments. The webinar is on April 10, 2014 at 1pm ET / 10am PT. Please click here if you would like to join us to learn how to use search to enable optimization of desktop virtualization deployments.