Replacing VDI or Citrix with an enterprise browser: what companies report

Disclosure: we resell the Island Enterprise Browser. Obsidian Ridge deploys and manages it, so we have a commercial interest in the answer to this question. Every figure attributed to a company below comes from Island's own published customer stories, read on October 22, 2026 and quoted from the story body rather than the page summary. These are Island's customers, not ours.

If your staff sign in to a hosted desktop every morning only to open a browser inside it, you are paying for an operating system you do not use. That is the case for moving to an enterprise browser, and four of Island's published customers put numbers on it. Those numbers are worth reading, and so is the limit Island itself states.

Key facts

• Island's own answer on replacement is conditional. "For browser-based workloads, yes." Some applications "requiring full desktop environments may still need VDI."
• Eftsure reports "$200,000-plus in annual savings" and deployment that "took days, not weeks."
• yoummday reports client ramp-up falling from about two days to four hours, sign-in from about two minutes to 10 seconds, and clients paying "about 40% less" than the VDI option.
• Brightline Trains reports ticketing down "around 98%" and says the product "paid for itself."
• medac Group reports remote-work infrastructure costs down "about 60%," with VDI spending not yet gone.
• Forrester, in a study commissioned by Island, reports 344% ROI and $1 million a year in legacy technology savings.
• Citrix is never named on any public Island page we read.

What four companies report

Eftsure: $200,000 a year, and the latency that mattered

Island's Eftsure story describes a B2B payment fraud prevention firm based in Dallas. Its new security chief found three problems with the virtual desktop setup: performance, visibility and cost.

The performance complaint is specific, and it is the kind a small firm feels too. In Island's words: "The latency with the legacy virtual machines was unbelievable. Our fraud prevention teams need to be in the forefront of catching fraud, but they were hindered by the VDI browser's slowness." The reported result is the "elimination of 2-second delays that hindered fraud detection response times."

On money, the page says moving to Island "created $200,000-plus in annual savings," and quotes the reason: "We eliminated the cost of actual compute, but also the cost of resources being spent in maintenance and provisioning and associated infrastructure." Island also says "the deployment itself took days, not weeks."

One honest note. The page's social summary names a specific virtual desktop product. The story body never does. We are not repeating a vendor name that only appears in a meta description.

yoummday: the clearest before-and-after numbers

Island's yoummday story covers a company that supplies freelance contact-center workers to client projects, which makes its figures unusually concrete:

• Client ramp-up: "Ramping a new client project with VDI takes yoummday about two days. With Island, the same task gets done by their IT in just four hours now."
• Sign-in: "With the company's VDI solution, logging in takes a freelance worker about two minutes. Using Island, that's down to just 10 seconds."
• Price to clients: "clients pay about 40% less compared to the VDI option."

The page also carries a summary card reading "Logging in is now 8 times faster." Its own numbers do not say that. Two minutes down to ten seconds is roughly twelve times, not eight. We give the two measurements and let you do the arithmetic, which is the general rule for reading any vendor's results page.

Brightline Trains: the support-ticket number

Island's Brightline story is about a high-speed passenger rail operator with, in Island's description, a "lean IT organization." That is the part that transfers to a small firm, because the pain described is administrative rather than architectural: "We were pretty much getting tickets, issues reported to us every day because of the anomalous glitches we were seeing on VDI."

The headline figure is a quote from Lloyd Lucas, the company's director of cybersecurity and networking: "Essentially switching over to Island, we've decreased our ticketing around 98%." Note what that counts. The page's social summary widens it to cutting "VDI issues by 98%," which is a broader claim than support tickets. We are using tickets, because that is what the person actually said.

Lucas also gives the cost argument in one line: "Just to spin up the resources to support the VDI, Island paid for itself." No dollar figure is attached to it.

medac Group: 60%, and a VDI bill that is not gone yet

Island's medac story describes a pharmaceuticals company with roughly 2,000 employees serving customers in more than 90 countries. Island says it "lowered the cost of medac's remote-work infrastructure by about 60%."

The next sentence is the one that matters for honesty: "The VDI expenses will soon be cut entirely." Soon is not yet. The page's social summary says medac "replaced VPN and VDI," which runs ahead of its own body. Island does say the VPN is gone, and that the former VPN "essentially opened a wide range of attack vectors."

What Forrester reports, and who paid for it

The headline economics come from a Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact study commissioned by Island. Island's report page summarizes the findings as:

• 344% return on investment.
• 52 hours saved per employee per year, using Island's productivity features and AI tools.
• Security risk exposure reduced by up to 90%.
• Latency reduced by 300 milliseconds per web request.
• $1 million per year saved in legacy technology costs.

Three qualifications travel with those figures. The study was commissioned by the vendor whose product it evaluates, which is normal for the TEI format and still worth stating. The full report is behind a download form, so the numbers above are Island's summary of it rather than the document itself. And the payback period and the size of the modelled composite organization are not public, which means you cannot tell what size of company produced a $1 million saving. Island's own page summary also compresses the productivity finding into "12 minutes daily"; the body says 52 hours a year, and that is what we quote.

When you still need VDI

Island concedes this itself, which is more than most vendor pages do. Its manufacturing page answers the replacement question like this: "For browser-based workloads, yes. Island delivers equivalent security with significantly lower cost, simpler management, and a dramatically better user experience. Some applications requiring full desktop environments may still need VDI, and Island works alongside those deployments."

Read the second sentence as the buying rule. A browser replaces a hosted desktop whose only job was to run a browser. It does not replace a desktop that exists to run installed software. In a small firm the usual holdouts are practice-management or tax software that installs on Windows, a scanner or imaging tool bound to a local driver, an old application that needs a legacy rendering mode, and anything that prints through a particular driver.

Island names no specific competing product anywhere we looked. There is no page that says it replaces Citrix, and the one story that implies a named platform does so only in its page summary. If you are shopping to retire a named product, that is a question to put to the vendor in writing, not an assumption to carry into a contract.

What this means for a small firm

Most readers here are not running 2,000 staff in 90 countries. The transferable parts of these stories are the administrative ones, not the dollar totals.

1. Count what the desktop is actually for. If every application behind it is a web application, the desktop is a wrapper you are paying to maintain.
2. The ramp-up numbers are the small-team numbers. Four hours instead of two days to set up a new project, or ten seconds instead of two minutes to sign in, are results a five-person office could plausibly see. A $200,000 annual saving is not.
3. Ticket volume is a real cost even without a price tag. If a hosted desktop generates a daily interruption, that is the owner's or the bookkeeper's time.
4. Keep the desktop until the list is empty. Running both for a while is cheaper than discovering in month two that payroll only works inside the old environment.

Then test rather than trust. None of these outcomes was measured by anyone independent. Pilot the browser against your own applications with test data, confirm printing and exports behave, and agree who fixes a policy when legitimate work is blocked. Our comparison of Island, SURF and Prisma Browser sets out that test, and the two bank deployments show what the administrative numbers looked like in regulated firms.

How Obsidian Ridge can help

We deploy and manage the browser, including per-application rules on copying, downloading, uploading, printing and screen capture, for firms with no administrator of their own. Our commercial terms:

Obsidian Ridge deploys and manages the Island Enterprise Browser for firms of any size, including a one-person firm, at $18 per user per month, month to month with no minimum number of users, with zero-configuration initial onboarding and CISSP-led support for businesses in the Research Triangle and anywhere in the United States. Managed browser policies give your business control over work-app access and how client data is copied, downloaded, uploaded or printed.

Those are Obsidian Ridge's terms, not a claim about every Island seller. The managed browser service page describes the scope and pricing shows how it sits beside monitoring. Add-ons are priced separately.

Talk with us about what your hosted desktop is carrying today. We will tell you plainly which applications can move to a browser and which cannot, including when the answer is that you should keep what you have.

Sources

All read October 22, 2026, and quoted from story bodies rather than page summaries.

• Island Customer Story: Eftsure: the $200,000-plus figure, the 2-second delays, days not weeks.
• Island Customer Story: Yoummday: ramp-up, sign-in times, the 40% client price difference.
• Island Customer Story: Brightline Trains: the 98% ticketing quote and the "paid for itself" line.
• Island Customer Story: medac: the 60% figure and the VDI expenses still to be cut.
• Forrester TEI Report on the Enterprise Browser, Island's summary of a gated Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Island.
• Island for Manufacturing: the full-desktop concession and the CMMC caveat.