Not Containerizing Your Applications Can Increase Costs up to 50%
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses clinging to traditional application deployment methods and package formats – such as setup.exe, MSI packages, and application layering solutions – risk falling behind. While these legacy methods were sufficient at the onset of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), they are not designed for modern Windows desktop environments.
Continuing to leverage them today means accepting significant hidden costs due to operational inefficiencies, security vulnerabilities, and scaling limitations. Containerizing applications offers a more flexible, secure, and scalable approach to application virtualization, provisioning, and management.
Here’s why businesses should replace their outdated application delivery methods with application containers and cloud-native application orchestration.
The Top 5 Hidden Costs of Not Containerizing Applications
1. Inefficiencies That Drain IT Resources
Traditional application deployment methods require extensive manual effort from IT teams. Installation, configuration, patching, and troubleshooting can be time-consuming and error prone. MSI packages and setup.exe installers often lead to installation failures and compatibility issues across different Windows versions, requiring additional IT intervention to ensure smooth functionality.
Moreover, application layering solutions, while intended to streamline application management, often introduce complexity and additional overhead. They may not always work seamlessly across different environments or scale adequately, leading to frequent troubleshooting and increased administrative effort. This results in wasted man-hours and higher operational costs that could be better spent on innovation and strategic initiatives.
2. Security Risks from Legacy Deployment Models
Security is a significant concern in a world where cyber threats continue to evolve. Traditional application packaging and deployment methods lack the security isolation that modern application containers provide. Without containers, applications run directly on the host OS, increasing the attack surface and making it easier for malware and exploits to spread.
Additionally, traditional software deployment models often lack automated patching and updating capabilities, leading to outdated applications that are vulnerable to security breaches. With application containers, updates and security patches can be deployed seamlessly and uniformly, ensuring all users have access to the latest, most secure versions of their applications.
3. Scaling Challenges and Deployment Bottlenecks
Businesses that rely on setup.exe and MSI packages face major scalability hurdles. Rolling out applications across hundreds or thousands of endpoints using these traditional methods requires extensive planning and effort. Each installation process is unique to the endpoint’s configuration, leading to inconsistencies and increased support requests.
In contrast, application containers allow for seamless deployment and scaling across environments. Containers can encapsulate application dependencies, eliminating the need for extensive pre-installation configuration and testing. This makes it easier to deploy applications across different devices, locations, and cloud environments with minimal effort.
See how easy it is to provision application containers to modern Windows OS in this Cloudpager platform demonstration:
4. Poor Employee Experience and Productivity Loss
A disjointed application deployment process affects employee productivity. Traditional methods often lead to long installation times, version conflicts, and dependency issues that result in application crashes or degraded performance. These disruptions lead to lost productivity and frustration among employees.
Containerizing your applications allows for faster startup times, consistent performance, and reduced downtime. Employees can access applications instantly without worrying about installation issues or compatibility conflicts, leading to a smoother and more efficient work experience.
5. Higher Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
While legacy deployment methods may seem like a path of least resistance and cost-effective at first glance, the long-term costs of maintaining these systems quickly add up. Businesses must account for:
- IT labor costs due to extensive troubleshooting and maintenance
- Security breaches and the financial impact of data leaks
- Productivity losses from inconsistent application performance
- Hardware and infrastructure costs due to inefficient resource utilization
- Operational overhead by having various deployment methods for virtual and physical endpoints.
By adopting modern application virtualization and containerization strategies, businesses can significantly reduce their total cost of ownership while improving security, efficiency, and scalability.
The Case for Application Virtualization and Containers
The Hidden Costs of Not Containerizing Applications Aren’t Worth Holding Out For
The shift towards virtualized applications and containerized deployment models is not just a technological upgrade, it’s a strategic necessity. Application containers provide a lightweight, scalable, and secure way to deploy applications across different environments, whether on-premises or in the cloud. They eliminate compatibility issues, improve security, and reduce operational overhead, allowing IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives rather than mundane troubleshooting tasks.
Businesses that continue to rely on outdated application deployment models are incurring hidden costs that will only grow over time. By modernizing their approach through application containerization, organizations can future-proof their IT infrastructure, improve user experience, and enhance security, all while reducing operational expenses.
The choice is clear: embrace application containerization to unlock the full potential of your IT ecosystem or risk falling behind in an increasingly digital world.
Dive into the World of Application Containers
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