10 challenges that hold back Horizon success

Deploying virtual desktops and apps with Omnissa Horizon enables secure access, operational efficiency, and a better end-user experience. But realizing those benefits quickly and consistently can be difficult, especially when internal teams are stretched thin or facing a learning curve.  Horizon Accelerator helps turn these challenges into an operational advantage by offloading routine tasks, reducing complexity, and freeing IT teams to focus on higher-value work.  

Whether you're starting fresh or scaling an existing deployment, hidden pitfalls can slow adoption, increase operational burden, or introduce unnecessary risk. Based on real-world experience from our VDI experts, the Horizon Pros, this list highlights the most common issues IT teams face and how Horizon Accelerator, a managed service combining expert guidance with hands-on support, helps resolve them across every phase of the Horizon lifecycle. 

Here are the top ten challenges that often get in the way of Horizon success, and how Horizon Accelerator helps you move past them. 

Figure 1.  Horizon Accelerator delivers value across every phase of the Horizon VDI lifecyle, from the initial design to daily operations that help optimize performance and long-term success.  

1. Architecture built for long-term scale and performance
Have you validated your Horizon environment against proven reference architectures? Misalignment with best practices can lead to performance issues or architectural designs that don’t scale effectively.

With Horizon Accelerator: You can scale confidently and more efficiently manage operations, by starting with a validated architecture that reduces design missteps. This is enabled through expert-led configuration built on validated templates and standard blueprints that cover image design, networking, UAG, and capacity planning across on-prem and cloud.

2. Lack of purpose-built use cases
Are your desktop pools and app delivery aligned to real user needs? Many deployments falter because they treat all users the same or fail to support peripherals, mobility, or security needs. 

With Horizon Accelerator: Horizon Pros tailor your deployment to user roles, application requirements, and endpoint needs, helping you deliver a better experience from day one.

3. Reactive instead of proactive capacity planning
Are you scaling based on demand or waiting for user complaints? Resource constraints can quietly degrade performance over time.

With Horizon Accelerator: Ongoing capacity analysis helps ensure your environment stays right-sized for demand, preventing slowdowns and helping you plan for growth.

4. Patching and upgrades delayed or skipped
Are Windows updates, Horizon agent patches, or infrastructure upgrades falling behind? Delays in applying critical updates can leave your environment exposed and under-optimized. 

With Horizon Accelerator: You get hands-on help with Windows updates, proactive vulnerability assessments with remediation recommendations, and expert-led upgrades across Horizon components, including Connection Servers, Horizon Agents, and the Horizon Cloud control plane. This helps keep your environment secure, compliant, and current. 

5. Day-to-day VDI administration consumes too much time 
Are internal teams bogged down with tickets, image edits, or pool changes? 

With Horizon Accelerator: Offload image creation, app publishing, and desktop operations to our Horizon Pros, freeing your team for strategic work. 

6. Lack of deep troubleshooting expertise 
When something breaks, can you isolate the issue? Troubleshooting VDI may be difficult when you need to analyze layers that may include client, apps, network, protocol, or identity. 

With Horizon Accelerator: Troubleshooting VDI can involve looking at client devices to identity providers to protocol performance, making it difficult to isolate the root cause without the right expertise. Horizon Accelerator acts as your embedded expert team, providing 24x7 L2/L3 support to rapidly triage, isolate, and resolve issues across the full VDI stack. 

7. No optimization strategy for performance or cost 
Are you running Horizon "as-is"? Environments need tuning as user needs evolve. 

With Horizon Accelerator: Experts continuously evaluate, recommend, and implement performance and cost optimizations based on real usage data, helping you deliver a high-quality experience without overspending. 

8. Limited integration across the workspace stack 
Is Horizon siloed from your digital workspace? Missed opportunities in unified endpoint management (UEM), policy control, and experience management? 

With Horizon Accelerator: We integrate Horizon with tools like Workspace ONE UEM, Workspace ONE  Experience Management, and dynamic environment manager (DEM) to unify access, policies, and profiles to enhance the user experience and simplify management. 

9. No time to explore new use cases or features 
Do you lack bandwidth to test and deploy Horizon capabilities like multi-session, DEM, or App Volumes? 

With Horizon Accelerator: We help evaluate new features, validate them in your environment, and build a plan for production rollout, helping you gain more value without increasing the workload.  

10. Lack of design and documentation creates long-term risk 
It’s often overlooked, but critical. Without detailed design and architecture documentation, troubleshooting becomes guesswork and future upgrades are risky. 

With Horizon Accelerator: Documentation is built and maintained alongside your deployment, giving you clear visibility and long-term operational confidence. These assets also support training, upgrade planning, audits, and help desk escalations. 

Free up your team to focus on strategic priorities 

VDI success isn't just about maintenance, it’s about momentum. Too often, highly skilled internal IT staff spend their days bogged down in patching, image updates, or reactive support. Horizon Accelerator offloads these tasks to seasoned experts, allowing your team to focus on high-impact initiatives like automation, experience optimization, or innovation projects that move your business forward. 

Get more from your Horizon investment 

Horizon Accelerator helps you get more out of your Horizon investment, not just by filling skill gaps, but by elevating your entire approach to desktop and app delivery. From onboarding and migrations to ongoing performance tuning and support, Horizon Accelerator is your expert partner across the full VDI lifecycle.  That value comes to life with Haaglanden Medisch Centrum, a Dutch clinical and teaching hospital specializing in trauma, neurosurgery, and oncology. With Horizon Accelerator, they were able to close critical IT skill gaps and support continuous operations in their healthcare environment.   

Learn more about their story and how expert-led services with Horizon Accelerator can help you get the most value from your Horizon investment.