Most enterprises already run more than one virtual desktop platform. Is your operating model built for that?

If you run virtual desktops for a large organization, you’ve probably heard the question framed as a choice: stay on the platform you have or move to Microsoft. It’s a tidy way to describe the market, and it shows up in a lot of vendor messaging and analyst commentary.  

The Great Migration research examined what enterprises run in their end-user computing (EUC) environments today, and the picture is messier than that framing suggests. For most teams, it’s also more reassuring. 

Multi-platform is already the norm 

In the research, 71% of respondents run two or more desktop virtualization or cloud desktop platforms. Broken out, 29% run a single platform, 37% run two, and 34% run three or more. Single-platform environments are the smallest group, and a third of respondents have three or more platforms to keep track of. 

If your own environment includes more than one platform, you may have been treating that as a temporary state. The research shows it as the current state of the market. That matters if you’ve been stuck on which platform to commit to, because most of your peers haven’t settled that question either. Many of them are running several platforms in the meantime, which means you can modernize one workload at a time without resolving the bigger decision first. 

Incumbent platforms and Microsoft are coexisting 

Organizations with significant Citrix or Omnissa deployments are adding Microsoft technologies to their strategies now instead of waiting for a single future migration event. In practice, that looks like bringing in Windows 365 or Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) for specific workloads while the existing platform keeps serving the rest. Waiting for one big migration means waiting until the budget, the timeline, and the appetite for risk all line up, and adding a platform for a single workload doesn’t require any of that. 

Microsoft’s release of Azure Virtual Desktop Hybrid (AVD Hybrid) points the same way. It’s another sign that hybrid deployment models will stay part of enterprise EUC, so environments that span more than one platform and more than one location are likely to remain that way for a long time. 

What coexistence means for your planning 

Once you treat several platforms as the normal state, the planning question becomes how to run all of them well. The research shows how common coexistence is. It doesn’t tell you how to manage it, so these are the considerations we’d start with. 

Deciding which workloads belong on which platform comes first, and it tends to hold up better as a set of criteria than as a one-time ruling. Who depends on a workload and what it connects to will often point toward one platform over another. If you write that reasoning down, the next request for a new workload gets answered without restarting the debate. 

Consistency across platforms comes next, covering images, policies, and identity. When each platform is built and configured separately, users notice the gaps before anyone else does: a setting that works on one desktop is missing on another, or access granted in one place never made it to the other. Keeping these aligned mostly comes down to agreeing on a standard and applying it everywhere. 

Ownership is the consideration that gets overlooked most often. In many organizations, each platform grew up with its own team, its own tools, and its own on-call rotation, and nobody was ever asked to take responsibility for the combined environment. Someone needs to own the questions that cross platforms, such as who approves a new desktop request, or who gets the call when a user can’t sign in and it isn’t clear which platform is at fault. 

Cost visibility is the last one. Spend lands in several places at once, across each platform's contracts and the Microsoft licenses the company already holds, so it's hard to say what it costs to deliver a desktop or whether a workload sits on the right platform. A shared view of cost across environments lets you compare them on the same terms, and it keeps workload decisions from depending on whichever invoice is easiest to find. 

None of these requires a final decision about a single platform. You can start on all four now, while the mix of platforms in your environment continues to change. 

Where operating models go from here 

If multi-platform is today’s reality, the next question is where enterprise operating models are headed over the next 12 to 24 months, and what that means for the planning you’re doing now. The Great Migration report looks at both. 

Download The Great Migration report to see the full independent research.