It has been a rough road for VDI and especially for the organizations that have struggled with their implementations. The complex, do-it-yourself (DIY) model, using a solution stack built for a single customer in a single data center, is no longer relevant in the cloud era. What’s readily doable today goes leaps and bounds beyond the promises of legacy VDI to deliver real business value – fast. Here’s how.

SaaS Cloud PCs in the Fast Lane

So, if you take a look at the VDI stack in terms of capabilities, there are three broad areas to examine – infrastructure (servers, storage, and virtualization), legacy VDI software and finally, the integration & operations needed to run the solution. Even though a lot of attention is often focused on the legacy VDI software stack, the overall solution cost & complexity stems primarily from the integration and ongoing operation of the VDI stack.

The Workspot Enterprise Desktop Cloud is the first virtual desktop solution built for the public cloud era. It’s turnkey SaaS that modernizes legacy VDI. Because we deliver virtual desktops as a service, you don’t have to deal with any of the complexity anymore. We do it for you. Plus, it’s important to note that we invented cloud-native virtual desktops; we are not just running someone else’s technology. The close partnerships we have with our customers are enabled by a very short feedback loop. Your pilot can be up and running in a few days, and your production rollout live in 30-90 days, depending on the complexity of your enterprise requirements. Our Go-Live Deployment Services cover helping you roll out your first production use case to the first set of users. As a company, we are focused on your business success, because that’s the only way we can all be successful. So we include the services needed to take you live into the cost of your subscription fee. Our solution is priced at a flat rate per user – the rate depends on the configurations you choose for your cloud desktops and workstations. Finally, we take full responsibility for the SLA of your Cloud PCs – all the elements in the blue box in the picture below, including the availability of the public cloud. Imagine what you can do with all those IT resources you can free up!

Old Way                              New Way

It’s time to modernize VDI with Cloud PCs.

Now, inventing a cloud-native, SaaS Cloud PC platform is a tough problem, because a true SaaS service has to be multi-tenant and turnkey, and this necessitates building the solution from scratch. Legacy, single-tenant, DIY, on-premises VDI architectures cannot be evolved into a cloud-native SaaS service. Multiple legacy software vendors have tried and failed with this approach – witness Siebel, BMC, Peoplesoft and others.

You can build a great cloud-native service in one data center. But the public cloud adds another strategically important dimension which is at the crux of realizing business value: the ability to take advantage of the edge of the cloud.

A New Virtual Desktop Architecture is Required for the Public Cloud Era

If you look at all legacy software stacks – databases, app servers, and VDI – they were built for a single data center, and with great difficulty and a ton of IT resources, customers operated them in 2-3 data centers. Often this was done with replicated instances and management. The public cloud offers each customer the ability to run software in tens of cloud regions worldwide – essentially you have tens of data centers available to you. These cloud regions are also connected using the best, fastest, most reliable networks. A completely new, built-from-the-ground-up architecture was needed to take advantage of the massive scale of the public cloud, because you simply cannot install and operate 50 copies of everything and hope to succeed. So, that’s what we built; the Workspot Desktop Control Fabric a cloud-native, globally distributed architecture that allows you to scale horizontally across cloud regions – in minutes. That is a massive innovation in the VDI space that is fundamentally transforming how companies do business and how they grow.

The Desktop Control Fabric – Only from Workspot

The diagram below illustrates what’s possible as organizations take advantage of cloud-scale virtual desktops. With other Cloud PC solutions, you need specialized public cloud skills, because you’ll have to deal with compute, storage, networking, and images in each cloud region. Your costs will vary in each cloud region, and they will add up to what could be an unpleasant surprise.

First and foremost, Workspot’s mission is to alleviate VDI complexity and reduce the costs of operating virtual desktops, so we built an Workspot Desktop Control Fabric, a global, elastic architecture that abstracts and simplifies the public cloud for virtual desktop use cases. Today your organization has access to more than a hundred cloud regions – and counting. With Workspot’s SaaS Cloud PC platform, you simply select the cloud regions closest to your users, then select yourCloud PC configurations – how many CPUs, how much memory, and how much storage for each. Then, you leave the rest to us! It’s our job to deliver on the SLA of your Cloud PCs globally.We also help you manage the costs whether you’ve chosen a flat-pricing or pay-as-you-go model.

Additionally, you have the opportunity to map the unique requirements for each of your use cases to the Cloud PC best suited for the job. You might want persistent Windows 10/11 desktops for your developers and CAD designers. You might want non-persistent desktops or Windows application access for your call center agents; some users need GPUs, some don’t. And so on…

Finally, even though your end users are distributed across the globe, they experience great performance because their desktops and data are located in the nearest cloud region. When was the last time you heard that VDI performance is better than a local desktop or workstation? Never? We hear this every day about our Cloud PCs and workstations.

Workspot’s global, multi-cloud Desktop Control Fabric is a massive innovation for virtual desktops.

It’s really important to note that Workspot helps IT manage all the layers – cloud, fabric, use cases, and users –  through a single pane of glass. No one else can do this.

The fabric has obvious benefits for creating a global Cloud PC footprint, including fast time to value and great performance for your users, but those benefits are just the beginning.  For example, the elastic nature of the fabric reduces end-user desktop provisioning time dramatically, especially when integrated with your favorite IT service catalog, such as ServiceNow. Also, deep instrumentation embedded in every layer of the Cloud PC stack allows for intelligent, real-time root cause and blast radius analysis – on a global scale – to meet the most demanding SLAs.

Ready to talk with Workspot about your use case requirements? We can help you ask the right questions of all the vendors you evaluate to ensure the solution you choose sets you up for success. Schedule a demo now!

The Cloud Desktop Fabric is a trademark of Workspot, Inc. and is patent pending.

The post What is the Workspot Desktop Control Fabric Architecture for SaaS Cloud PCs? appeared first on Workspot.

Ready for cloud-native DaaS transformation

The widespread acceptance of remote working is driving dramatic changes in the technology landscape. Most companies have enabled remote work in two primary ways: They use a Windows PC and a VPN, or they implement VDI to enable remote Windows PC access. Unfortunately VPNs bring security risks and don’t scale easily, and VDI is complex and therefore resource-intensive and expensive to manage. Neither solution is ideal for the long term, and it’s clear that IT teams are discovering the weaknesses and risks of these approaches.

As a result, most companies are now designing for a zero-trust architecture, where the remote employee uses a device of their choice or a zero-trust device, such as a Chromebook, to access a Windows PC running in the cloud. To achieve this end user computing transformation, companies are faced with the question of whether they should take a lift-and-shift, do-it-yourself (DIY) approach and move their existing VDI stack to the cloud or choose an entirely new, built-from-the-ground-up, cloud-native DaaS solution architecture.

Old architectures can’t keep up

When you think about it, VDI architectures were developed well over a decade ago. While technology has marched on around them, they didn’t change; they can’t change. VDI was built for a single data center, and that’s how it works best – when everyone is close to that single data center, users may have a decent experience. While there are real security benefits for traditional VDI, there are also serious scalability difficulties. And we all know about the complexity that IT teams have to manage on a day-to-day basis. When you lift and shift legacy VDI to the cloud, these problems don’t go away – they just get moved to someone else’s data center.

This is why old VDI architectures can’t keep up. For the cloud era, a new architecture was needed, and Workspot built it: The Desktop Control Fabric architecture. This white paper describes our innovative architecture in more detail. Here are 5 reasons why you should choose the most up-to-date, cloud-native architecture for your cloud DaaS implementation:

1. DIY is complex; SaaS simplifies everything
2. Avoid lost productivity & save money
3. Hyper-local performance is great for users
4. Utility billing models give you predictability
5. Ongoing partnership guides your cloud journey

Bonus reason: Multi-cloud Strategy!

DIY vs. SaaS

Are you tired of operating the dozens of software and hardware components of your DIY VDI stack? Could those IT resources be put to better use? We often hear from our customers that even though they have the in-house skillsets to do it themselves, they just don’t want to spend their time upgrading and troubleshooting brokers, load balancers, licensing servers, and the many other components of their infrastructure. 

Workspot has built the only multi-cloud SaaS platform for Desktop as a Service (DaaS). The difference is that when you simply lift and shift your existing VDI to the cloud, you take with you all the same performance, scalability, and resource-intensive troubleshooting problems with you. There’s no getting away from them. Alternatively, you can leave all these issues behind when you choose Workspot’s SaaS cloud-native DaaS platform. You can deliver cloud desktops and workstations from Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or both, and leave all the platform upgrades and support to us. Why DIY when someone else can do it better, and you can reallocate those precious IT resources to other projects?

Avoid Lost Productivity

VDI is one of the most mission critical workloads in the enterprise. If people can’t access their PCs or virtual desktops, they can’t work, and that costs the business serious money. One of our customers told us that they lose $150/user/hr when their on-premises VDI is down. Another customer calculated lost productivity for a day of downtime at $1 million. That’s why they made the move to Workspot. Here are some key questions to consider:

1. What tools do you use to monitor and troubleshoot your on-premises VDI? Are they available in the cloud?
2. How do you know when a user is unable to connect or is having a poor experience with their virtual desktop?
3. Can you quickly troubleshoot the problem when a user complains?
4. Are you prepared to troubleshoot IaaS and other software components in the cloud?

Reliability is crucial. Our industry-leading 99.95% cloud desktop uptime makes all the difference, but we don’t stop there. At Workspot, we monitor our cloud desktop service globally, with the only real-time Network Operations Center for end user computing. By proactively monitoring our service operations, we can  ensure your users are always able to access their cloud desktop. 

Hyper-Local Performance for Users

We have yet to meet a customer whose users are happy about the performance of their VDI solution. It’s unfortunate that the IT team has to spend so much time dealing with performance issues. If all your users are close to your data center, their performance may be acceptable, but what about people who are remote? Are those VDI users happy? Because they connect to your data center via high latency connections, their productivity is surely suffering (and that costs the company money!). So, what do we mean by “hyper-local”? Our customers tell us that their cloud desktops and workstations perform better than their physical desktops, which is as local as you can get! 

Given the opportunity to keep users happy and productive, why would you settle for anything else? When the public cloud is comprised of tens of data centers all over the world, just waiting  to serve you, why would you settle for a single data center? This is why you need to choose an architecture that allows you to deploy virtual desktops into the public cloud region nearest each of your users. This reduces latency between the user and their desktop, which gives every user amazing performance. That’s what a SaaS cloud-native DaaS solution will do for you!

Utility Operation & Billing Models

You understand how to plan for and procure perpetual software licenses and on-premises hardware for peak usage. It’s an unfortunate reality that because you’ve been forced to over-provision, it’s likely that you see less than 20% utilization of your on-premises infrastructure. The servers, storage, and software sits idle for more than 80% of the time! Additionally, on-premises infrastructure is ill-suited to rapid expansion and contraction. Workspot’s cloud desktop platform offers a utility pricing and operation model where you pay for what you actually use and everything just works, so you don’t have to think about it too much. Plus, you’re able to take advantage of best-of-cloud features in both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Does your legacy infrastructure do all that?

Ongoing Partnership & Guidance

Today you buy software and hardware from a variety of vendors. You may pay a consultant to help you install it, but then everything else is your problem. If you run into an issue, you are on your own to solve it. That’s a foreign concept at Workspot.

Our customer success and support teams will be with you on your entire journey. We will help you deploy new use cases, and we’ll jump right in to help you troubleshoot a problem. We find that 99% of the time, when a problem arises, it’s with the cloud provider, or your network provider, or an upgrade to your DNS, but that doesn’t mean we won’t help. We have built tools and telemetry so that our teams can help you more rapidly analyze the problem. Because of our monitoring capabilities and big data analysis, our team can spot patterns that indicate issues beyond the Workspot platform. For example, a cloud region may go down, or a new Windows update is causing problems, or a Zoom update is wreaking havoc. We spot the pattern affecting our users and we can help escalate the issue faster with those vendors because we see that multiple customers are experiencing the same issues.

Why do we do this? It’s simple; we want your users to be happy and productive. That’s our mission.

Multi-Cloud Strategy

Once you have decided to look for a cloud-native DaaS solution, it is important to choose a multi-cloud solution. Why? The clouds have very different capabilities, and there can be as much as a 3-5x difference in price/performance between clouds. You’ll want to be able to take advantage of these differences and optimize your cloud desktop deployment accordingly. Our Customer Success Team can help with that decision process. Lastly, planning for business resilience is another reason to go multi-cloud. Workspot is the only cloud desktop platform that spans Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, delivering the best of all worlds for your end user computing transformation. Here’s a recent article published on Network Computing describing why a multi-cloud approach helps IT teams deliver reliable service, while minimizing complexity and strengthening security.

Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo and we’ll have a discussion about your challenges and requirements. It will be time well spent!

The post Don’t Lift & Shift Your VDI! Simplify with Cloud-Native DaaS appeared first on Workspot.

The current device landscape can be visualized as a table of devices that have two modes of interaction – keyboard/mouse or touch, and three screen sizes – small, medium and large.

The adoption by end users of a variety of devices for different use cases has driven apart the end user computing Pangaea into three continents.

The Apple Continent

The Apple continent is the most complete of the three. Apple’s devices span the screen size spectrum from small to large and have devices that enable both modes of interaction – keyboard/mouse and touch. Further, with the introduction of the M1 ARM based Macs, 5m iOS applications can now run on the Mac too. There are also many end user workflows that span the different devices seamlessly – incoming calls, text messages, browsing, and more, making the Apple continent an alluring environment with rich resources.

The Microsoft Continent

The Microsoft continent dominates the keyboard-mouse device landscape. Windows PCs continue to be the dominant keyboard-mouse platform both for consumers and enterprises. Other keyboard-mouse platforms such as Chromebooks and MacOS have fewer than 100m users each. It’s true that Microsoft continent is the weakest in terms of small screen and touch devices. But don’t count them out; they are launching Surface Duo, an Android phone, and Windows 10X, a new operating system. Taken together, they are forming a strong defensive strategy against the Google Chromebook threat.

The Google Continent

The Google continent dominates the small screen market – 80% of small screen devices run the Android operating system. Because of their low total cost of ownership and excellent security profile, Chromebooks have dominated the education market. But so far, Chromebooks have struggled to penetrate deeper into either the consumer or enterprise markets.

Plate Tectonics

As with the initial fracturing of the Microsoft Pangaea, there are market forces (plate tectonics if we stick with our analogy!) that continually exert their force in end user computing, with varying degrees of energy at different times. Ever-changing end user preferences as well as shifting IT strategies threaten to disrupt Windows PC dominance. Today, the most active plates presenting a threat include:

• Chromebooks + DaaS (Desktop as a Service) to enable Zero Trust Computing
• M1 Macbook vs. Windows PC

How much will the movement and force of these plates shake the enterprise and consumer markets? Let’s examine them further.

Chromebooks + DaaS for Zero Trust Computing

Enterprise customers are increasingly looking at options to combat ongoing security challenges with Windows, including ransomware and malware, which are being exacerbated by the expansion in remote work.

In a survey conducted by ESG, 88% of enterprises want a solution that would allow them to use a modern endpoint, such as a smartphone or Chromebook, to connect to a Windows desktop running remotely. Many organizations want to replace a Windows endpoint with a low-cost, low maintenance, more secure Chromebook end point. End users can use Chromebooks to connect to a virtual Windows PC running either in the cloud or in an on-premises data center. While virtualizing Windows is not new, the previous generation of virtualization technologies, referred to as VDI, failed to deliver on both the price and performance requirements of most businesses. This is why VDI never became mainstream. But a modern, cloud-native SaaS approach to Desktop as a Service (DaaS) from Amazon and Workspot is proving that the elusive TCO and performance benefits promised by VDI vendors but never fulfilled, can now be delivered.

M1 Macbook vs. Windows PC

Will Macbooks with ARM chips finally allow Apple to take Windows PC market share? Will consumers who use iPhones and iPads finally choose a Macbook as their keyboard-mouse platform because it brings millions of applications to the platform? Apple is creating seamless experiences that span small to large devices with both modes of interaction, while Microsoft, although continuing to be an enterprise powerhouse, has some catching up to do in the seamless experience department.

What’s Next?

What do the plate tectonics tell us?  First, it’s clear that enterprise IT teams continue to have serious concerns around security. With the requirement for supporting remote working – likely for the long term – securing sensitive data becomes even more challenging. We know that end points such as laptops can easily be lost or stolen, putting the company at risk for a serious security breach. This is what is driving the growing interest in Chromebooks plus the right DaaS solution. Virtualizing the desktop means that company data no longer resides on end points – it stays safely in the cloud. The security benefits of virtualized desktops has always been compelling. What’s different today is that IT no longer has to choose between securing data or providing a seamless, highly performant experience to users. With a cloud-native SaaS cloud desktop solution, users can flip between a Chromebook, a laptop and a smartphone as they navigate the day, picking up right where they left off on the previous device. They’re able to seamlessly access the apps and data they need to stay productive anywhere. Because their desktop is delivered from the nearest cloud region, latency is minimal, and that means they get amazing performance no matter where they are working.

The evolution of the device landscape across the 3 continents is very exciting. As Apple, Microsoft and Google compete for market share, the options for end users just keep getting better, giving everyone the freedom to work using the best device for the task at hand.

Ready to learn more about how a cloud-native, SaaS approach to Desktop as a Service enforces your Zero Trust Security policy while “wow-ing” your end users? Schedule a Workspot demo and we’ll show you why the architecture of the DaaS solution you choose is critical for ensuring your security and performance needs are met.

The post The 3 Continents of End User Computing – What Are the Forces Shaping Them? appeared first on Workspot.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations to take immediate action to support remote work. So many people thought it would be a short term transition, that solution analysis from a long-term perspective didn’t really enter the picture in many organizations – understandably so. As the virus has persisted, people have not only become accustomed to working remotely (and come to value it for the flexibility it brings), but reports directly from our customers tell us that people have been more productive working from home. In fact, Workspot customers are not just surviving, they are thriving during this time. As a result, it seems clear that many people will continue working from home for the foreseeable future. It’s interesting to think about the scenario where, just as we used to work from home one or two days a week, perhaps now we will visit the office to connect with our colleagues one or two days per week. As one of the people who is more productive at home, this makes perfect sense to me.

The challenge for IT teams is that in the rush to get people back to productivity, organizations that deployed quick, short-term solutions for remote workers must now consider what will serve business goals and employees alike for the long term. Security, performance and scalability have never been more critical to get right so you have the flexibility needed to grow the business.

What’s the problem with VDI and VPNs?

In a nutshell? The problems are serious: performance and security. Wherever they are located, people need secure access to their applications and data to get their jobs done, yet if app performance is slow when they’re working remotely, by definition the business is going to take a productivity hit. And security is paramount. Any end user computing solution should be governed by a Zero Trust policy. VDI and VPNs just don’t cut it.

User experience is everything

When the number of people working remotely was relatively low, IT could get by with a VPN solution (setting aside the security concerns VPNs introduce for now), because the small number of people working remotely could use their corporate-owned device and establish a secure network tunnel back through the VPN to the corporate datacenter, and then access their applications and data. But suddenly with widespread remote working required, IT teams have really struggled to scale the VPN infrastructure. All that additional traffic strains the VPN, users experience latency, and productivity suffers. Other companies already had VDI in place, which offers better security than a VPN for sure but comes with its own challenges, especially if your organization is distributed across geographical regions. Companies with existing VDI implementations expanded them as fast as they could, but that is no small feat. Even for those who had the resources to send everyone home to a virtual desktop, there’s no getting around the latency that people who are far from the datacenter experience, and that means those users are unhappy and less productive. So, in this story so far we have two scenarios where these solutions might have helped your company survive, but how can they thrive with reduced productivity?

Security is everyone’s top concern

Most large enterprises are moving toward a Zero Trust Security policy, in which everyone – inside and outside the organization – is considered a security risk until proven otherwise. By the way, that includes your virtual desktop vendor – they should not be able to see any of your data! Many organizations are rightly concerned about the security of VPNs. Its very nature gives malware a direct route into the datacenter. Plus, sensitive data can be copied to endpoints and compromised either knowingly or through an honest mistake when that endpoint is lost or stolen. Organizations cannot afford this glaring security risk, so if you had to make do with a VPN to get people working when the pandemic hit, it’s time to consider plan B.

With VDI, security is a whole different story. Many organizations adopted VDI for the very reason that centralizing apps and data in the data center keeps it more secure, and they were right about that. So with VDI, you have pretty good security. Check. But if productivity is suffering, the business can’t grow. Your data might be secure, but if scalability is difficult and expensive, you can’t respond well to new opportunities. Plus, how can you predict how many people will be working remotely 6 months from now or a year from now? How will you avoid over-provisioning or under-provisioning virtual desktops? With VDI your data is more secure, but you lack the agility and flexibility to nimbly dial resources up and down that you’d otherwise have with a modern virtual desktop solution.

The future of desktops is in the cloud

Compared to what’s possible today, VPN and VDI technologies stymie enterprise growth. Neither of these technologies was designed to address the widespread work-from-home scenarios companies are experiencing today – and for the foreseeable future. Today, organizations of all sizes require an end user computing solution that supports the ability to work from anywhere, with little or no intervention from IT. It should be a seamless transition that happens at a moment’s notice; people should be able to simply go home and pick up work where they left off, on whichever device they feel like using.

The good news is that in the cloud era, IT leaders have a modern end user computing solution to consider that replaces VPNs and VDI: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) virtual desktops. This is different than a Managed Service Provider (MSP) hosting some other vendor’s virtual desktops for you in their datacenter. We call it a cloud PC – it’s a Windows 10 PC in the public cloud that your users access with their favorite device. A SaaS solution makes it simple and elastic for IT to deliver virtual desktops to end users anywhere in the world. By taking advantage of  cloud regions globally and managing everything using a single admin console, IT can dramatically simplify their processes and move on to tackling more strategic projects in support of the business’ growth plans. Cloud PCs, because they are placed in the public cloud region closest to the end user, are outstanding performers – latency is typically so low that our customers often tell us users see faster performance than a physical PC! With the right solution, your Zero Trust Security policy is fortified, not compromised.

Addressing the extended remote working timeline

When Gartner surveyed 317 CFOs and finance leaders recently, 74% of them said they plan to shift “at least five percent of their previously on-site workforce to permanently remote positions post-COVID-19.” Nearly one-quarter (23%) plan to convert at least 20% of previously on-site employees into permanent telecommuters. Twitter and Square are just two of the companies that have already announced their employees can work remotely forever. Update: Microsoft has decided to allow employees to permanently work from home as well – it’s definitely a thing, and enterprises need the flexibility to make these kinds of decisions at the appropriate time.

Given the extended timeline of COVID and the huge numbers of people who will likely work remotely full time, it’s time to think about whether your organization is surviving or thriving. Is your end user computing plan sustainable? Will it take your business into the future and drive the ability to achieve your business goals? If you’re skeptical, and if there is an facet of your current end user computing solution that you’re struggling with, it’s time to start the search for a long-term solution. VDI and VPNs are legacy solutions that were never intended to support a large contingent of remote workers, making them unsuitable for today’s needs.

SaaS virtual desktops offer much-needed flexibility and agility to grow the business now and into the future.

Ready to learn more about Workspot? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how to spin up thousands of cloud PCs across multiple cloud regions in under 5 minutes!

The post The Trouble with VPNs & VDI for Remote Work appeared first on Workspot.

The Most Mission Critical Enterprise Workload

When you think about it, desktops are more mission critical than any other workload in the data center – more than SAP, Exchange, and other enterprise apps. If SAP is down, your users cannot access SAP for a time, but they can continue to be productive by switching gears and working on something else. However, if users virtual desktops are unavailable, they can’t just move on to another task; if their virtual desktop is down, productivity plummets to zero. That’s not a risk you want to take, and yet, our customers repeatedly tell us that they have to spend too much time just keeping their legacy VDI solutions up and running. CIOs tell us they need an alternative to the VDI “babysitting” that takes up so many valuable resources.

Legacy VDI is Complex & Expensive to Operate

Most of the cost of legacy VDI stems from day-to-day operations. All of this complexity requires an organization to commit multi-function, level 2 / level 3 IT skill sets to operate their VDI infrastructure. The litany of day to day challenges when users cannot connect or are experiencing poor performance demands ongoing troubleshooting by these valuable people to continually address server, storage, virtualization, networking, and end point issues. In an attempt to get in front of these issues, companies often use third party monitoring tools to diagnose and troubleshoot user issues. The challenge is that these third party tools can’t always access the systems where issues are occurring; they are limited by how observable all of the underlying systems are.

All of these challenges are exacerbated by the complexity of upgrading all the different components of the VDI  infrastructure, including clients, agents, brokers, databases, load balancers, gateways, virtualization, servers, storage, networking, licensing servers, guest operating system & more. Phew! Your IT team better have strong change-management techniques, because an upgrade of any of these components can cause unforeseen problems that typically require multiple, expensive people to unravel!

Even if your IT team is used to all the legacy VDI babysitting, why would you want to spend time and money that way? Your IT people can contribute to the business in much more valuable ways.

Workspot Cloud PC Simplicity Lowers TCO

At first glance, you’d think that “enterprise-simplicity” is an oxymoron. Large enterprises have all types of users, and the business has existing processes, security policies, regulatory obligations and other unique requirements.  We built our turnkey, SaaS cloud PC platform with simplicity for enterprise operation as our mission, so the total cost of ownership goes down and overall value to the business goes up.  Forget about the operational complexity and expense of legacy VDI. When we talk about “turnkey”, we mean that we are responsible not only for ensuring “go-live” success, but also for continually upgrading the service, with upgrades typically happening every 6-8 weeks. All of these updates are immediately available to all of our customers. Your IT team doesn’t have to spend one more minute grappling with virtual desktop infrastructure upgrades. Most of our customer-facing components auto-upgrade, however, some of our customers choose to retain control over the Workspot Client updates so they can orchestrate that process with their users.

Legacy VDI complexity is history; Workspot eliminates it with our turnkey, enterprise-proven
SaaS cloud PC platform on Azure and Google Cloud.

We are focused on delivering simplicity – simple to deploy, simple to scale and simple to operate. But behind the scenes there are multiple components that need to be coordinated in order to deliver our cloud PC service with the very best reliability and high-availability. The diagram below represents an end user using Workspot Client running on their endpoint-of-choice (Windows PC, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux), to connect over a network (WiFi, Cellular), to a public cloud (Azure and/or Google Cloud) to any of the dozens of cloud regions available from Azure or Google Cloud, the connection then traverses a gateway to a Windows 10 cloud PC running the Workspot Agent. The cloud PC itself may be connected through S2S networking to the corporate data center.

We have made it simple for a customer to deploy and scale their users onto this architectural framework, and we are focused on making sure that the user connections are both reliable and performant.

Our mission for enterprise-simplicity shields IT teams from the underlying cloud PC service components, while also allowing themcontrol over their implementation. Workspot is responsible for reliability, high-availability, and easy scalability.

Three Areas of Operational Simplicity

We focus on three primary areas for achieving operational simplicity:

1. Architect the product for high availability so the users can connect to their cloud PCs reliably.
2. Collect data in real-time about usage, security events, and errors from all the service components involved in the delivery of a cloud PC experience.
3. Focus on pro-active mitigation, which includes resolving a problem fast, and understanding and mitigating the impact of a problem across more users or more customers.

Workspot’s turnkey service shields system complexity from IT teams, while also
enabling them to stay in full control of their implementation.

Learning Cycle to Continuously Improve Operational Simplicity

The key to continuously improving operational simplicity for our customers is a tight learning cycle we have established between our customers, our customer-facing teams and our product teams. Every time we see a problem at any of our customers, we ask ourselves the following questions:

(a) Did we see the problem before it happened? If not, what do we need to do to either prevent it from happening (architecture) or see the problem through instrumentation.

(b) If we saw the problem, did we have all the information needed to quickly diagnose the problem ourselves? If not, what instrumentation needs to be added to the product so that we can conduct the root-cause analysis in real-time?

(c) Were we able to limit the impact of the problem to the smallest number of users possible? Are the right procedures in place to do so?

Product Architected for High Availability

Some of the critical architectural features that deliver high availability are:

(1) Our Control Plane is not in the Critical Path: Our control plane has 99.99+% reliability, but in the event that it is unavailable, we want to make sure that the user is still able to connect to their cloud PC. For 95% of our use cases, a user is able to connect to their cloud PC even if Workspot Control is unavailable.

(2) Backup & Restore: Each cloud PC can be configured for two scheduled backups. IT can quickly restore any individual cloud PC to one of the backups.

(3) Regional Disaster Recovery: For customers who want the highest level of availability, we offer cloud region disaster recovery which enables a cloud PC to be restored in minutes in a different region of the public cloud, should their primary region become unavailable for any reason.

Real-Time Data for Visibility

We collect a lot of data about everything that goes in our systems:

(1) Network Operations Center: Our customer support team monitors all user access in real-time using our Network Operations Center. We want to be aware of any challenges in access – unavailability or poor performance.

(2) Security Events: We collect real-time security data about user access, configuration changes and other events. These security events can be pulled via APIs into the customer SIEM tools, such as Splunk.

(3) Usage: Many of our customers are interested in understanding what end users are doing within their cloud PCs.

Pro-Active Mitigation

Once we notice there is a problem, our customer support teams are focused on two key areas:

(1) Fast Time to Resolution: How do we resolve the problem quickly? In the vast majority of cases, the problem is due to something that is outside our control; perhaps IT upgraded the cloud PC image, or the network that the user is connected to went down, or the infrastructure in the public cloud region was updated and encountered a glitch. In rare cases, an entire cloud region has gone down. If it’s a problem that was caused by something we did – a client update or control plane update – then we want to fix the problem as quickly as possible.

(2) Impact Analysis: Once we see a problem, we want to understand whether it affects one user, all the users in a certain region for one customer, all the users across customers in one region, or all customers. Once our customer support team can understand the impact of the problem, our goal is to pro-actively warn the potentially affected customers.

Our mission for enterprise operational simplicity has dramatically transformed end user computing for our customers. We are absolutely committed to your success, and we have the technology, and the team to make that happen for you! Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo and let’s discuss how Workspot can meet your complex requirements while simplifying your world.

The post Forget Everything You Know About VDI! Operational Simplicity is Here. appeared first on Workspot.

Our customers have a few different kinds of scaling needs:

• Add more users to an existing use case
• Move users to existing cloud regions
• Add more cloud regions to an existing use case
• Add new use cases

Adding More Users to an Existing Use Case

Most of our customers initially engage with us with a specific use case in mind, and they expand from there. Our philosophy is to show the customer the value they receive with the first use case, and then once we have proven value, the customer will happily expand their engagement with us, knowing they can be confident about the benefits we deliver. The first use case typically involves a target subset of users (5-10% of the total employees/contractors), and the cloud regions in which the users are located.

Once the our customers recognize the value, the next step is usually to add more users to the first use case. This is an extremely simple process with Workspot – the customer simply adds more licenses. Everything scales automatically in most cases, and users can be added in minutes. On occasion we have run into capacity constraints from the public cloud provider in a particular cloud region, but we have been successful escalating those needs through the right channels to acquire capacity and  to ensure our customers’ needs are met.

ITSM Self-Service Integration Makes Adding Users Even Easier

Customers who have made investments in ITSM solutions such as ServiceNow are able to make the addition of users even easier.

Let’s say the customer has contract developers in multiple locations around the world.  Shashi, a developer based in India, needs a particular GPU desktop, and she needs it fast – within minutes of approval by her boss. Now what do you do? Under any other circumstance, that just would not be possible. The good news is Workspot can enable exactly what’s needed.

3 easy steps: Workspot APIs enable cloud PC provisioning in minutes using existing ITSM systems.

Step 1: Shashi opens up ServiceNow, her company’s IT service catalog. She finds a pre-defined offering for a 4-CPU machine, with GPU, and 16 GB RAM in the catalog. Perfect! She submits a request for the virtual desktop.

Step 2: Shashi’s request then flows through  the company’s already-established, standard business process which results in her manager approving the request. This kicks off automation that invokes an integration with Workspot APIs.

Step 3: A cloud PC is quickly spun up for Shashi in the cloud region closest to her, and a few minutes later she receives an email with the instructions on how to access it. When she does, she experiences outstanding cloud PC performance  – with less than 25ms latency!

The upshot: within minutes of the original request, our developer has access to exactly the right cloud PC, hosted in the local cloud region in India, and she is productive immediately, from any device, experiencing  better performance than her physical PC!  Her cloud PC has all the apps and configurations she needs to start using it immediately. The best part: This super-efficient process for getting that desktop is exactly the same for developers in any region of the world.

Moving Users to an Existing Region

There are a few reasons why, after we begin implementing Workspot for a customer, that we may move some users to different cloud regions. To start, the customer’s IT team will designate which users’ cloud PCs are deployed in which cloud region. But they may then make changes to their network, or new public cloud regions become available, or they move more applications or data to the cloud. These are all scenarios in which moving users to a different public cloud region can make the performance users experience even better! Once again, this type of scalability is fast and easy for Workspot.

Adding More Regions to Existing Use Case

Often after the customer’s initial production deployment, word gets around the company about how great the performance is and the IT team hears “I want a Workspot!” When new business units want to use the Workspot solution, it’s usually the case that these new users are in different geographies than the users already deployed. In this scenario, we need to expand the customer footprint to one or more new cloud regions.

Workspot’s ground-breaking elastic infrastructure layer, The Workspot Cloud Desktop Fabric makes this process simple:

• In the IaaS layer, a new region is created – new CIDR blocks for networking have to be allocated
• A new pool of cloud PCs are created for that new region
• Users in that new region are assigned to the new pool

The “long pole in the tent” is the acquisition of the CIDR blocks which can take a day or two. The rest of this process takes a few hours. Try this with any other solution. You can’t do it.

Adding New Use Cases

Once the customer has their first cloud PC use case deployed in the cloud, most of the heavy lifting has already been done: Data center connectivity is handled, Windows 10 templates are created and tuned, the client security stack is implemented etc. A new use case can be rolled out rapidly, especially if the new users are in the same region as the existing use case. If they don’t happen to be in the same region, we just set up the new region first.

In all these scalability examples, our world-class Customer Success Team is at your side. Nothing stumps them. They have so much virtual desktop and public cloud experience (all flavors!) that our customers tell us, over and over, that the best thing about working with Workspot, next to how great the technology works, is working side by side with Workspot Customer Success. This is why you can be confident that you can easily scale cloud PCs, meet all your requirements, and achieve fast time-to-value. We wouldn’t have it any other way!

Want to see how it works?  Schedule a demo, and we can explore your unique requirements.

The post Forget Everything You Know About VDI! Easily Scale Cloud PCs. appeared first on Workspot.

Workspot is different.  Our innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud desktop solution makes it simple for enterprise IT teams to deploy, operate, and scale virtual desktops in any region of Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. In this blog, we will focus on how we make it simple to deploy your first use case, and how you can then easily add tens, hundreds, or thousands of users across cloud regions globally (in minutes!) as your business changes and grows.

Simple, Turnkey SaaS Cloud PCs

Legacy VDI solutions are complex and rigid to deploy. IT must have a very good understanding of the scope of the project, because they have to architect and procure servers, storage, networking, and software for the forecasted number of users. This step is critical to get right because IT could seriously under-estimate – or even worse, over-estimate – the number of people who will be using the solution. Once the planning phase is complete, IT personnel and hired consultants spend months integrating the stack and testing the solution with a small set of pilot users. Ultimately, it could be upwards of 9-12 months before the project can go live. Consider this: After all that effort and money spent, you end up with VDI deployed in only one data center!

The legacy VDI stack is too complex to deploy and manage. Workspot solved the problem with its SaaS cloud PC solution.

To solve the operational complexity  of VDI, we built a software-as-a-service (SaaS ) platform that delivers the entire VDI stack as a turnkey solution that is simple to deploy, manage and scale. We want our customers to think of deploying our cloud PC solution in the same way they would think about deploying PCs – except that it’s easier and faster with Workspot! Workspot cloud PCs are available in a wide range of CPU and GPU configurations. Simply choose the cloud PC configuration needed for your users, depending on what they need to accomplish in their roles. Workspot cloud PCs feature predictable, flat-rate pricing that includes cloud compute costs, deployment services, and support. Even better, your IT team can turn its attention to more important projects, because we take responsibility for delivering the highest business SLA, while your IT team also stays in control of the implementation. It’s truly the best of all worlds for IT.

Simple, Yet Enterprise-Class Cloud PCs

You might consider other SaaS solutions for virtual desktops that are simple to deploy; in some cases you might be able to swipe a credit card and get a desktop! But the devil is in the details as they say. With these solutions you typically get a vanilla image that is a Windows 10 “experience” rather than a true, customizable Windows 10 cloud desktop. With those solutions, you have to install your own applications, and there’s going to be a learning curve for your team because it’s highly unlikely that you can use your existing management tools and IT processes.

We started with the recognition that every enterprise has unique requirements, including:

• Custom corporate Windows 10 image
• Custom corporate apps
• Custom MFA
• Custom corporate security policies & tools
• Custom image management tools (like SCCM)

While we engineered the Workspot SaaS platform to be incredibly simple to use, it is also able to integrate with your custom Windows 10 images, security policies, image management tools, and more. This is ideal for IT teams because it doesn’t disrupt the tools and policies they already have in place; you just deploy your Workspot cloud PCs and both IT and users hit the ground running.

Our Customer Success Team is Key to Your Success

For 80% of our customers, Workspot is their first workload in the public cloud. Our Customer Success Team is comprised of phenomenal virtual desktop industry experts, and their goal is your success. They work closely with your team to understand your initial use cases and where your users are located in the world. They assess what kind of networking options you have to connect with the cloud, and they help you deploy your corporate Windows 10 image in the cloud, implement MFA, and address your questions.

Probably the most critical aspect of the initial session with Workspot Customer Success is to understand the network topology: In which regions of the public cloud should we place the cloud PCs? How should the corporate data center be connected to the public cloud (typically site-to-site VPN)? Has any SD-WAN already been deployed? Your networking team is involved at each step as we bridge the cloud and data center networks. Depending on the availability of your networking team, this process can range from a few hours to several days.

In parallel, as the networking scenarios are addressed, we are working with your desktop team to create your corporate cloud PC image.

In a few days, your first set of cloud PCs are available for testing by IT. When they give their blessing, then we bring in users to give us their assessment on the experience. It can take a few days to a couple of weeks to optimize the image to deliver the best performance. We find that many customers have bloated images, and they take this opportunity to clean everything up.

Finally, once your end users are happy with the quality of their experience, we work with your project management team to roll out cloud PCs across multiple offices and multiple regions.

Our flat-rate subscription fees include 90 days of go-live services provided by our Customer Success Team. On average, we can be in production in less than 30 days, and we’ve achieved large deployments in far less time! The key to getting you up and running fast is working efficiently together  – we’re on the same team!

Data & Continuous Learning Drives Simplicity

We don’t charge for these Customer Success services that take customers to production. This is a deliberate choice we made as we reinvented both VDI technology as well as the business model. Our #1 goal is to make sure that our customers are happy. Our Customer Success and Support teams are continuously learning with every customer implementation because every enterprise has unique needs. In addition, we collect real-time data from users’ activity to determine whether the users are able to connect to their cloud PCs and whether they are seeing great performance. We also analyze security behavioral data from inside the cloud PC. All of this helps us identify where any gaps while delivering the most reliable, highest quality experience to our customers. This deep understanding is continuously fed back into the product roadmap and results in ongoing improvements to all of the solution elements: clients, agents, gateways, control, data engine, and more. It’s an ongoing mission to make our solution even simpler to deploy, scale and operate.

Through real-time data collection and analysis, feedback is continuously used to deliver new platform features and improvements.

Be sure to catch next week’s blog! With your current solution, if it takes more than 5 minutes to add 1000 virtual desktop users around the globe, don’t miss our blog next week on how we make Workspot Cloud PCs easy to scale! If you can’t wait until then, be sure to schedule a demo and we’ll show you how we do it!

The post Forget Everything You Know About VDI! Workspot Makes it Simple to Deploy appeared first on Workspot.

This week, let’s examine why you should move to the cloud and take your desktops with you, why working with a Managed Service Provider (MSP) can’t take your organization where it needs to go, and why the right cloud desktop solution can.

Most enterprise customers have deployed legacy VDI on-premises over the last decade. For most of them, it has been a challenging experience operationally, their end users have been unhappy about the performance of their virtual desktops, and therefore the scope of these implementations have been limited.

When we talk to the CIOs and other IT leaders in these organizations, there are three questions we can always count on hearing:

(1) Why should we move to the cloud? Isn’t it similar to hosting?

(2) If we have to go to the cloud, why wouldn’t we choose the cloud solution from our IaaS provider, if they have one?

(3) Why should we choose Workspot?

Why Should We Move to the Cloud? Isn’t it Similar to Hosting?

The data center era is over. CIOs want out of data center management so they can focus on the core competencies of their own business. Fortunately, there are hundreds of reasons to move workloads to the cloud; every company will have access to that many data centers – all over the world! This is the low-latency infrastructure era: cloud “data centers” are everywhere, connected by 30Gbps network backplanes.

The data center era is over. Now, the low-latency infrastructure era offers massive scale and exceptional performance.

For most workloads – databases, SAP, application servers, and legacy VDI – having access to hundreds of data centers is not useful. Legacy enterprise software was written for use in one data center; you cannot simply take this type of solution and duplicate it in the hundreds of public cloud regions that are now available to you. It’s just not scalable, and even it it were, how could you afford to run hundreds of data centers?

Some organizations have outsourced VDI to a local managed service provider (MSP), which relieves them of day to day management (for a fee), but the infrastructure challenges remain the same – you’re just dealing with a different data center that someone else is running. It’s hard to scale, performance is dismal for users who are more than 50ms away from the MSP’s data center, and it takes time to resolve issues when they arise – which results in end user downtime. Further, organizations faced with data security or compliance concerns must also evaluate each provider from that perspective. The DIY and MSP approaches to virtual desktops do not solve your scalability, performance or security issues. But the right cloud PC solution does.

For virtual desktops, it is imperative that you take advantage of the globally-distributed public cloud. Why? Because large organizations’ users and their PCs are distributed over the world. If you can place their virtual desktops in a cloud region nearest to them, you will get low latency/high bandwidth connectivity between the user and their virtual desktop; this architecture enables exceptional performance for your end users, no matter where they are in the world. A solution architecture that enables horizontal scalability (in minutes) across cloud regions, is managed through a single console, and strengthens your Zero Trust Security initiative is what you can expect today.

Why Shouldn’t We Choose The Solution from Our IaaS Provider?

The answer is simple: most companies need to have a multi-cloud strategy. A recent survey by Flexera found that nearly 93% of the respondents wanted a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy.

Enterprises have multi-cloud strategies for good reason. Only Workspot offers cloud PCs that span public clouds and are managed through a single console.

The public clouds are architected very differently. They have different types of servers (x86 vs. ARM), different kinds of GPUs (nVIDIA vs. AMD), different hypervisors (KVM vs. Hyper-V), and various storage and networking technologies. If you want a multi-cloud strategy, it would be too expensive and complicated to train your IT staff on all of the different components that make up each public cloud. Consequently, a cloud desktop solution that abstracts away the underlying cloud differences and complexity becomes essential for organizations to execute on their multi-cloud strategy. Further, our internal performance benchmarks show significant price/performance differences for virtual workloads. Wouldn’t you want the flexibility of choosing the right platform to deliver the best price/performance for every end user?

Why Workspot Cloud Desktops?

Workspot is the only cloud desktop solution that lets you provision Windows 10 workloads in both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud and manage it all from a single pane of glass.

We make it simple for IT to deploy Windows 10 cloud PCs into any Azure or GCP region in the world, for optimal end user performance. We deliver flat, predictable, subscription pricing for each cloud PC. That means that the Workspot cloud PC, plus the cost of the cloud compute to run it, Go-Live Services, and support, are all included in the cost of your Workspot cloud PC. There are no surprises in your bill! Plus, there are many configurations available  – you decide which users need how much CPU, Memory, GPU, Storage. Some users will require persistent desktops, some can use non-persistent desktops, and others just need secure access to published apps. That’s the kind of flexibility enterprise IT needs to meet the work requirements of all kinds of end users: knowledge workers, task workers, and power users. End users love the performance they get, and IT loves the simplicity of deploying and managing all their cloud desktops through Workspot’s single pane of glass. The IT team can relinquish responsibility for the SLA of the cloud PC to Workspot. We take care of that for you so your IT people can focus on more important matters!

The Workspot difference: Simplify IT, delight end users, expand business opportunities around the globe!

Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo and you can ask all the really hard questions of our experts. We’ll show you how Workspot is different from any other solution on the planet, and how we work with you to ensure your success.

The post Forget Everything You Know About VDI! Move to the Cloud. appeared first on Workspot.

How Low Can We Go?

On stage at Amazon’s inaugural re:Mars artificial-intelligence and robotics event, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon said, “It’s interesting, I do get asked quite frequently what’s going to change in the next 10 years. One thing I rarely get asked is probably even more important — and I encourage you to think about this — it’s the question: What’s not going to change in the next 10 years. The answer to that question can allow you to organize your activities. You can work on those things with the confidence to know that all the energy you put into them today is still going to be paying you dividends 10 years from now.”

In the world of end user computing performance, the need for lower and lower latency is one of those things that won’t change. The lower the latency, the better the application performance, the faster the data processing, the higher the productivity – bringing us ever-faster outcomes, whatever it is we might be creating or analyzing.

Let’s take a closer look at what is driving the transformation toward the lowest-latency infrastructure.

The Data Center Era (1970-2015)

For as long we have known server side computing, it has been delivered from a data center, either owned by a company or operated out of a co-location facility. All software – databases, application server, web servers, load balancers, VDI, SAP, etc. – were all designed for this data center view of the world. Most mid-sized companies operated one data center close to their headquarters. Most large companies operated 3-4 data centers in the large geos – North America, EMEA, and APAC. And the software solution stacks were replicated in each data center. End users who were close to the data center experienced good performance, but for end users who were far from the data center(s),  performance depended on the latency and the quality of their WAN links. Because of this, during the data center era companies invested billions of dollars in WAN acceleration technology, such as Riverbed, to improve performance for remote users.

The Public Cloud Era (2014-)

SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow ushered in a new application delivery model. SaaS vendors operate the application for customers instead of each customer having to operate it themselves. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors such as Amazon Web Services introduced the enterprise to the public cloud model, where they could consume infrastructure, yet offload the management of it to the vendor. The most obvious benefits of the public cloud were greater agility and elasticity. IT could consume resources on-demand without having to wait months to spec, procure, and provision infrastructure. But IaaS also provided another, more nuanced but even more powerful benefit: Each customer gains access to tens of regions in which they can deploy infrastructure. No longer is infrastructure availability limited to 1-3 regions for companies. With public cloud global ubiquity, they have the ability to deploy software in tens of regions around the world without even lifting another finger. Now, this massive public cloud scale isn’t very useful for legacy software that was designed for the data center era, because it cannot take advantage of this globally distributed architecture. But there is a new generation of software – CockroachDB, Spanner, CosmosDB (databases), Workspot (VDI) are examples – that is built for this distributed world. And the resulting reduction in latencies from hundreds of milliseconds to tens of milliseconds is transforming the end user experience and therefore improving business productivity and opening doors to new opportunities for growth.

The Mobile Edge Era (2019-)

Yet with the public cloud, latency is still typically in the 5-25ms range. With the advent of 5G enabling cellular connectivity with sub-5ms latencies, there is a rush to combine low-latency compute at the mobile edge. Amazon has announced AWS Local Zones in Los Angeles and AWS Wavelength with Verizon, KDDI, Vodafone and SK Telecom. Microsoft has announced Azure Edge Zones and Azure Edge Zones with AT&T, Telefonica, NTT, SK Telecom, and other carriers, and Google has announced GCP Mobile Edge Cloud with AT&T. We are still early in our discovery of all the use cases enabled by this lower-low-latency compute; there are so many opportunities emerging with immersive experiences, mobile gaming, self-driving vehicles and more – and as these infrastructure capabilities are more widely available, a new generation of applications will be created.

We know that the lower the latency, the better the user experience. That’s never going to change. As Jeff Bezos recommended, let’s try to optimize for that world!

Want to learn more about Workspot low-latency cloud PCs? Schedule a demo and let’s explore your requirements.

The post The Public Cloud Drive to Lowest-Latency Infrastructure appeared first on Workspot.

• 100% of the workforce could work from anywhere 5% of the time
• 5% of the workforce could work from anywhere 100% of the time

In order to address these use cases, IT provisioned two different sets of technologies.

Old-School Work-From-Anywhere Solutions

• IPSec VPN: IT-provisioned IPSec VPN technologies. For the vast majority of the time, end users connect from the office. However, when they are traveling or need to work from home, end users can use their corporate-owned device to establish a secure network tunnel back through their VPN to the corporate data centers and then access the apps and data running on servers. However, the quality of this experience depends greatly on the latency and the bandwidth of the remote connection. In these infrequent scenarios, people are able to work, albeit with a compromised experience that may reduce productivity.
• VDI:  IT provisioned Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). End users – contractors or remote employees  – could use their personal- or corporate-owned devices to gain access to Windows desktops or to applications running in a data center.

Neither of these technologies was designed to address the widespread work-from-home scenarios companies are experiencing today – and the foreseeable future.

VPN and VDI Just Don’t Cut it

There are several significant challenges with both VPN and VDI when it comes to supporting remote work:

• Security: Patching and updating corporate-owned PCs with latest security updates is already a difficult problem, even when the PCs are on-premises. IT and security leaders are acutely aware that a single unpatched PC can put the entire company at risk. However, this risk increases by an order of magnitude when PCs are remote and connected to the data center via a VPN. The ability to patch PCs becomes more difficult because the PC may be offline, or it might not be connected to the corporate network. Plus updates can be interrupted mid-stream more frequently when they are remote.
• Agility & Scalability: Both VPNs and VDI were provisioned for the use case where 5% of people are working remotely. Both technologies suffer from significant scalability and agility limitations. Both technologies actually stymie enterprise growth compared with what’s possible today with alternative approaches. Plus, the amount of infrastructure that would be required to accommodate the scenario where 100% of people need to work remotely is just too expensive.
• Performance:  To put it simply, users hate the performance of legacy VDI solutions. Our customers repeatedly tell us that legacy VDI negatively impacted productivity and made for some unhappy folks, and that doesn’t take into account the IT people who have to deal with the fallout. Often, people are compelled to use VDI for occasional access or because they have no other choice. If you’ve been a part of a VDI deployment or you’ve used VDI while remote from the data center, you know exactly what I’m saying: Imagine having to force 100% of the user population to adopt VDI – and then imagine the deluge of help desk tickets and complaints!
• SaaS: As more applications are delivered from the vendor directly via a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model and no longer run in the customer’s data center, funneling SaaS traffic through the VPN connection, back to the data center and then out to the SaaS vendor is sub-optimal in multiple ways. First, you need more VPN capacity to support all that traffic. Second, the performance of your SaaS app is going to be terrible.

Modern Work-From-Anywhere Solutions

The new reality for IT teams is that they need an end user computing solution that supports work from anywhere, with little or no intervention from IT. It should be a seamless transition that happens on a moment’s notice; people should be able to simply go home and pick up work where they left off. How should you plan for the dramatic increase in work-from-anywhere needs? What do modern work-from-anywhere solutions look like today?  IT leaders should explore two new solution categories that replace VPN and VDI in the cloud era:

• ZTNA: Zero Trust Network Access solutions from vendors such as Zscaler, Netskope, Pulse Secure and others are optimized for the SaaS and cloud era. They use a combination of techniques to solve the problems mentioned above by sending SaaS traffic directly to the vendor and making zero trust end points possible.
• Desktop as a Service (DaaS): Desktop as a Service solutions (such as Amazon Workspaces, Workspot, Nutanix Frame) are a SaaS equivalent of VDI. They make it simple and elastic for IT to deliver virtual desktops to end users. By taking advantage of service availability in cloud regions all over the world – Amazon WorkSpaces (13 regions), Workspot (all 58+Azure regions), Nutanix Frame (all Azure and AWS regions) – IT can dramatically simplify their overhead and processes, plus reduce latency and deliver better end user performance.

Both ZTNA and DaaS are fundamentally changing IT’s ability to solve the work-from-anywhere problem.

Want to learn more about how the Workspot Cloud Desktop Fabric is different than any other solution? Schedule a demo, we’ll explore your requirements, and show you how it works!

The post It’s Time to Rethink Work-From-Anywhere Solutions appeared first on Workspot.