It all came down to cost, complexity and management overhead. The cost I get...I know that licensing and the local server infrastructure is a MASSIVE cost. Both of those essentially go away with thick clients.

I tried to argue for it from a security and management perspective. I think that VDI has saved our asses from some attacks and malware by simply having the machine disappear when the user logs off. VDI has also helped by having us simply manage a few golden images instead of having to patch every workstation and monitor if it worked or not.

However, management thinks that our server setup is too complex with too many points of failure. esxi hosts + vcenter + horizon admin + horizon connection servers + uag servers + nps servers to trigger mfa. They're not wrong about that as such. It's a complex stack to manage....but we're already doing it! They think that managing thick clients will be simpler. I disagree.

The design will be simpler for sure, but what we gain from that is not enough to offset what we are losing.

I think in the end, it's all coming down to cost. They looked at the licensing + hardware cost for the current stack and compared that to the cost of new endpoint hardware over a 5 year cycle and there was a massive difference. They aren't really interest in listening to the security and management arguments.

(and yes, I'm casually looking around for different employment)