She recommends tracking what tools end users need and when time comes to upgrade gold desktop images, incorporate them.

She says it's imperative to check how licensing differs for applications when they are deployed virtually vs. being installed on PCs. The costs can differ significantly, she says. Some vendors don't care about the licensing but may have versions of their application that might be tuned specifically for cloud virtual desktop deployment.

When choosing how to deploy VDI, businesses should remain open to using desktop-as-a-service offerings, she says. The company chose Quest (then Desktone) in 2011 because it supported the Citrix HDX virtual desktop protocol and it was pleased with Quest's service.

It may be more expensive to host VDI in the cloud even with the costs of hardware, cooling, floorspace and staff with their benefits packages. It's worth a few hundred dollars per month extra to avoid all that and have the option to expand the infrastructure rapidly when the need arises, she says. "We didn't want to grow IT to the point where it was taking away from broadcasting," she says.