BOSTON / LAUSANNE – September 2, 2026 – Nexthink, the leader in Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management, is warning that organizations risk wasting their technology investment and significant portions of their workforce’s time due to poor virtual desktop performance, with employees losing the equivalent of one full working day every week to sluggish virtual desktops.
Data from the Nexthink VDI Experience platform shows that employees see 20% of their working time impacted by sluggish virtual desktop performance. With the virtual client computing software market valued at $7.12bn in 2025, and VDI accounting for an estimated 59.74% of that spend – approximately $4.25bn – organizations are pouring billions into infrastructure that is undermining productivity.
The scale of the problem is significant. Nexthink data shows 65% of VDI users experience applications running slowly, while 51% of businesses using VDI experience performance issues. Based on Gartner’s forecast that virtual desktops will become the primary workspace for 20% of workers by 2027, and IDC projections putting the global knowledge worker and developer population will be at an estimated 1.04 billion by that year, this poor experience could affect approximately 135 million digital workers worldwide.
The five most common root causes of VDI-related support tickets identified by Nexthink include unstable or inconsistent network conditions, resource contention caused by image design, complicated or outdated login flows and scripts, underpowered or aging endpoint devices, and application behavior changes in virtual environments.
“A slow virtual desktop is not just annoying. For many employees, it is where all their work happens, so when it is slow, people lose time, get frustrated and raise more support tickets,” said Maurice van den Driessche, Senior Solution Consultant at Nexthink. “The issue is that many organizations still measure VDI by whether the system is up and running, not whether people can actually work well on it. A platform can show 99.9% uptime and still leave users waiting too long to log in, open apps or complete basic tasks.”
“That is why Experience Level Agreements, or XLAs, are so important,” Driessche continued. “They help IT teams look at the real user experience, not just the health of the infrastructure. By bringing together user feedback, service data and technical performance data, organizations can see where employees are struggling, understand why it is happening and fix the problems that matter most. For companies using VDI at scale, especially in sectors like financial services, this can make a real difference to productivity, compliance training, collaboration and day-to-day work.”
To improve VDI performance and protect the return on investment, organizations should:
- Build a rounded view of success. Moving beyond cost as the primary measure. Adopt XLA thinking that centers on user outcomes, such as what employees need from their virtual desktop environment and which moments in their working day matter most.
- Monitor experience, not just infrastructure. CPU, RAM, and uptime metrics do not reflect what users experience. Measure logon times, application launch times, and session responsiveness from the user’s perspective.
- Measure how users feel. Couple technical data with regular sentiment snapshots through surveys or focus groups. Ask pointed questions about whether employees feel productive in their VDI environment.
- Review findings and respond visibly. Establish a clear process for acting on experience data. Critically, close the loop with users, showing that their feedback has been heard and acted on is as important as the remediation itself.
- Work actively on improvements. Prioritize fixes based on what has the greatest user impact at the lowest effort and cost. Take incremental steps and measure each one, so teams can demonstrate progress and accelerate improvement over time.
Methodology
The full workforce calculations are as follows:
- Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service forecasts that by 2027, virtual desktops will be used as the primary workspace for 20% of workers. IDC projects the global knowledge worker and developer population will grow from 888 million in 2025 to 1.2 billion in 2029. This suggests an annual growth of approximately 78 million and would put the 2027 figure at around 1.04 billion.
- Applying the 20% Gartner figure yields an estimated 208 million virtual desktop users by 2027. Of these, approximately 135 million could be affected by slow applications (using Nexthink’s 65% finding).
