Workspot delivers Cloud PCs for enterprise use cases across multiple AWS cloud regions. We are pleased to extend the choices Enterprise customers have for deploying Cloud PCs to include Amazon WorkSpaces Core. We make it simple to deploy, scale and troubleshoot Cloud PCs across all Amazon WorkSpaces Core regions via a single admin console. Workspot provides both persistent and non-persistent desktops, virtual apps and hosted shared desktops, as well as GPU accelerated desktops in AWS. Customers can go “all-in” on the cloud, or they can deploy Cloud PCs in the cloud and on-prem in their own data center, tailoring the deployment to the unique needs of each organization.

Our solution uniquely delivers significant business benefits that have not been achievable previously, including fast time-to-initial-value, innovative cost-optimization techniques, performance that delights even the most demanding end users, and global, real-time Cloud PC observability and health analysis using Workspot Watch and Workspot Trends.

The team at AWS has produced a blog with all the technical details about how to provision, configure and deploy Workspot Cloud PCs for Amazon WorkSpaces Core. This is the blog for you if you want to know more about licensing, creating an Amazon WorkSpaces custom bundle, joining the domain, setting up the Workspot Enterprise Connector and RD Gateway, managing the desktop VM, connecting with the Workspot Client, and more. Access the blog from the Amazon Workspaces Core team, “How to Set Up Workspot Cloud PCs and Amazon WorkSpaces Core” now.

To learn more:

Check out our product announcement “Workspot announces Cloud PCs powered by Amazon WorkSpaces Core” by Ivan O’Mahony, Senior Product Manager for AWS End User Computing services, focused on Amazon WorkSpaces Core.

• Go to workspot.com/AWS and signup for the Early Access Product Program for Workspot Cloud PCs for Amazon WorkSpaces Core.
• You can also come and see Workspot and AWS together in Nashville at the IGEL Disrupt 2023 event April 3rd through 5^th at the Gaylord Resort and Conference Center.  Our CEO, Amitabh Sinha, will be highlighting Workspot Cloud PCs for Amazon WorkSpaces Core during the early Wednesday general session. We’ll have live demos in the Expo Hall and I’ll be there along with Mark Callahan to share the latest innovations during our Workspot Technical Bootcamp and Breakout sessions.

And we’re saving the best for last as we share a very special treat for the EUC community: Mark Templeton’s Closing Keynote where he’ll be answering the top three questions he gets all the time:

1) What have you been up to?
2) Why Workspot? (he’s our Workspot Board Chairman)
3) What does the future hold?

No spoiler alerts here, but VDI Modernization is a core theme of Mark’s keynote, and his signature “One More Thing…” will pique your imagination – Cloud PCs could evolve in ways you may have never imagined. Hope to see you there!

The post New! AWS Has Published a Technical Guide for Workspot on Amazon Workspaces Core appeared first on Workspot.

I recently spoke with the IGEL team about my thoughts on the upcoming event in Munich, which is covered in IGEL’s blog and reproduced here. If you can’t attend the event but want to see Workspot in action, just schedule a demo here and we’ll show you what the SaaS Cloud PC excitement is all about!

The post The Scoop: Workspot Joins IGEL at DISRUPT23 in Munich appeared first on Workspot.

A Regional Gold sponsor of DISRUPT On Tour 2022 End User Computing Forum, Workspot offers insights into why it’s time to modernize VDI with Cloud PCs

 Workspot is among the Regional Gold sponsors of this year’s DISRUPT On Tour 2022 End User Computing Forum, which is making 21 stops in cities across North America and Europe. Alongside IGEL and other leading industry technology companies, Workspot will be showcasing the latest innovations and best practices to deliver digital workspace solutions for the hybrid work era. You can register for an event near you here: https://www.disrupteuc.com/ontour2022. Save your spot today!

While on-premises VDI has been an enterprise staple for decades, it often raises concerns about scalability, performance, and operational complexity. Similarly, trying to manage and secure fleets of physical PCs is complex and expensive. Modernizing these solutions with Cloud PC solutions helps IT organizations increase business agility, support work from anywhere, and even reduce operational costs – but how do you identify the best options for your organization?

Join me at DISRUPT On Tour for my session, “Modernize VDI (and Your Skills) in the Cloud.” I will share key insights into why Cloud PCs are the right solution for taking your organization into the future, including key take aways on the following:

• The optimal use cases for Cloud PCs
• Do-it-yourself VDI or SaaS Cloud PCs? What are the tradeoffs?
• In the cloud era, how should you think about endpoints?
• Time-to-value and user on-boarding: What can you expect from Cloud PCs?
• How to architect for chip to cloud security

Inspiring Keynotes and Presentations

DISRUPT On Tour is featuring keynote presentations and technology sessions from industry innovators and inspiring thought leaders from Microsoft, VMware, Nerdio, LG Electronics, deviceTRUST, IGEL and more.

See more on the presentations in store here https://www.disrupteuc.com/ontour2022.

Get Ready to DISRUPT

DISRUPT 2022 On Tour is taking to the road to visit a city near you. Don’t miss out! At these interactive, in-person, one-day events you’ll learn how to enable your people with the digital workspace solutions they need to stay safe, secure and thrive in their work and life. Plus, you’ll hear industry innovators and thought leaders as they share the strategies and tactics you need to stay one step ahead of your evolving EUC needs.

The event, hosted by IGEL, will also feature first-hand technical access to product and service information from event sponsors. Platinum sponsors of the event include LG Business Solutions, Nerdio, HP, VMware and Microsoft. Gold sponsors of the event include ControlUp, 7 Signal, Login VSI, Lenovo, Liquidware, EPOS, DeviceTRUST, Dynabook, Telia Cygate, Tricerat, and Workspot.

Register for the roadshow event near you now at https://www.disrupteuc.com/ontour2022. Save your spot today.

We’ll see you on the road!

Ready to learn more about Workspot Cloud PCs? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how it works.

The post How to Modernize VDI (and Your Skills) in the Cloud at DISRUPT On Tour appeared first on Workspot.

In conjunction with the highly regarded Engineering News Record (ENR), I had the pleasure of hosting a webinar featuring Workspot customer NELSON Worldwide. If you’re in the AEC industry, you’ll be familiar with ENR as one of the most authoritative sources for construction related topics. You can watch the full webinar here, but I wanted to also share some of the key insights they shared in this blog. You can also schedule a demo to see the SaaS Cloud PC platform that is delivering so much value to NELSON in action!

So back to THE definitive list, and to the sage advice that accompanied it.

The Cloud PC List for IT Leaders

If you take Matthew’s advice to its logical conclusion, you end up with a list of business requirements that make sense for organizations in any industry. NELSON Worldwide happens to be in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, but their strategic vision for the value that Cloud PCs needed to deliver should be your vision too:

• Hire from a worldwide talent pool
• Streamlined on-boarding process
• M&A: Incorporate new people and processes in hours, not months
• International expansion and growth
• On-demand workstations: add/moves/config changes to meet business demands
• Built-in disaster recovery and business continuity
• Reduce costs while increasing functionality and capabilities

NELSON sought a Cloud PC platform that could fulfill these business requirements without compromises, and they found it in Workspot.

The Cloud PC and Workstation Evaluation Process

Vendors! Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

NELSON reached out to six vendors with their requirements, including the obvious players in the VDI space. Their first requirement was a free proof of concept (POC), or proof of value (POV) because they believe the vendor needs to prove that what they are saying is true and show their value upfront. Would the solution replace a desktop or laptop computer, and would the compute environment be exactly the same?  This eliminated four vendors, who were apparently unwilling to take that risk. On the other hand, the Workspot team knows we’re adding tremendous value and we knew we could deliver an environment that was exactly the same as what NELSON’s end users were used to (or better!), and we were happy to conduct the POV.

Cross Platform and Cross Cloud Support

NELSON supports a variety of endpoints, including Windows, Mac, Android and iOS environments. Additionally, with NELSON’s offices scattered around the country, their intention to expand into global markets, and the need to support remote work, latency was a major concern. They needed the ability to place Cloud PCs and workstations across multiple cloud regions, and ultimately across multiple cloud providers. Workspot is the only SaaS Cloud PC platform that is easily scalable across multiple cloud regions and providers –  you can add Cloud PCs and workstations in a few minutes, anywhere in the world. Your end users can use their device of choice – whatever best fits where and when they are working.

Incremental Production Rollout

NELSON’s strategy was to step into the solution in increments. They wanted to roll out the Cloud PCs and workstations office by office to allow the change management process to unfold. This is where vendor flexibility is critical, and NELSON did not find it anywhere other than Workspot. Although the Workspot solution can be deployed all at once for hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of end users, NELSON chose to focus on cultivating buy-in from their end users. Workspot and NELSON worked together on extensive User Acceptance Testing (UAT) across departments, which is an important part of our Customer Success process. The NELSON team provided feedback that informed how our team would fine-tune the implementation to ensure outstanding performance that everyone would be happy with.

A Healthy Marriage: NELSON IT + Workspot

The relationship Workspot has with its customers is unique in the tech world. Most come to view us as an extension of their internal IT team – it’s a natural evolution. With NELSON, it was an explicit requirement. During their first call with us, they stated that they wanted a “marriage,” in which they would work closely with the vendor on an ongoing basis to ensure their requirements could be continually met as they grow and change. This is another area where Workspot shines. Beyond the benefits of our SaaS Cloud PC technology innovation, our Customer Success Team stays with our customers during the lifetime of their engagement with us. The cross-company team held weekly tech calls, worked on problems together, and discussed solutions together. Additionally, the Workspot team can monitor every customer’s environment to see exactly what they are experiencing, which accelerates resolution. Often we see a potential problem before it disrupts the customer’s environment – that’s powerful oversight to have, and no other vendor has it. We’re also able to interface with cloud providers to facilitate problems originating with them, which is a tremendous help to our customers, since navigating large public cloud provider support services can be daunting.

NELSON’s Business Benefits: How About that Cloud PC Vision List?

We’re pleased to be delivering value against each item on the vision list. Workspot Cloud PCs and workstations provide the freedom to hire people anywhere, so they can apply the best talent to the project. People can be on-boarded in minutes and productive on their new Cloud PC immediately. The business can grow beyond prior geographical boundaries, because now there are no boundaries; new branch offices are not needed, and latency is a non-issue, so work can be anywhere. Flexible configurations and flexible pricing models allow you to provide exactly the right compute resource for every organizational role – on-demand. Disaster recovery and business continuity are built in, because people can work from anywhere that is safe after a disaster and from any device. Plus, Workspot innovation take DR and BC preparation to new levels with Cloud PC high-availability options you won’t find anywhere else. Finally, NELSON describes several areas where they are realizing cost savings, including less expensive endpoints, break/fix schemes, fewer servers and domain controllers, no hypervisors, no VPN concentrators, no data center or colo, no costly redundancies, no duplicate internet connections. Additional financial benefits are derived from increased productivity, application and OS consistency and greater agility to pursue new opportunities.

Be sure to watch the entire webcast when you have time – it’s pretty cool to hear them tell their story of how NELSON and Workspot worked together to fulfill their vision and meet their list of requirements.

Ready to see how Workspot SaaS Cloud PCs work? Just schedule a demo and we’ll set it up!

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The post Conversations with Customers: THE Definitive Cloud PC Vision List for IT Leaders appeared first on Workspot.

Discovery

In the early days of the company they would have to take a USB drive with all the project data to a job site and upload it. To resolve that situation, they implemented on-premises VDI which helped by connecting the virtual machine to the project data, but the time it took to deploy was significant, and they also realized that the ongoing management overhead for the on-prem solution was going to be very resource-intensive..

It was at an industry conference that they were introduced to Workspot, and while they were impressed with the solution at that time, they had just implemented the on-premises solution, so making another change was going to be difficult given the recent infrastructure investment. However, the company was growing and adding personnel in multiple geographies around the world, and unfortunately the limitations of their on-prem solution were already showing. Not only was it difficult to scale, but anyone remote from the VMs experienced latency that reduced productivity.

Fast-forward a couple of years from that conference and it had became clear that the agility and productivity constraints of the on-premises VDI solution was slowing their business growth. it just could not keep up. They began rethinking their end user computing approach and reconnected with Workspot.

Implementation

As they sought to modernize VDI, the company had three primary objectives in addition to simplifying IT: Expand their talent pool globally, deliver better performance to their CAD power users, and eliminate business continuity vulnerabilities. Of course, security and IP protection is always top of mind.

“Workspot was a breath of fresh air. I didn’t have to get my hands dirty, ” says the project lead. The team appreciated the professionalism and expertise of Workspot’s Customer Success team and how they made deploying the solution so easy. “There was a very clear model for the implementation process and who was responsible for what, and that’s very important.”

Because the SaaS platform is so easy to manage, the company has created a new career path; entry-level IT people can become Workspot admins, spin up new Cloud PCs and easily support their end users. “We are creating new positions in IT and people are happier.”

Achieving Solution Objectives

There is no question that Workspot’s SaaS Cloud PC platform has eliminated complexity for enduser computing. IT can spin up new Cloud PCs anywhere in the world in a few minutes, and people can be productive immediately on their Cloud PCs and workstations. There’s no learning curve; people interact with their applications just as they always have.

Hire people anywhere –  The firm has achieved their objective of being able to hire the best talent anywhere in the world. With Cloud PCs, it’s irrelevant where people live and work, which makes it much easier to find the right specialized skills for the job. Cloud PCs also bring greater consistency because IT can specify and control what data and applications are accessible based on a person’s role in the company. This standardization enables “follow the sun” productivity, while also better securing IP.

Performance – With Workspot, latency is no longer an issue. Cloud PCs and workstations are deployed close to the person and close to the data. It’s that tight coupling of all three, enabled by public cloud ubiquity, that delivers outstanding performance that delights even the most demanding power users.

Business continuity – Prior to Workspot, the IT team was very concerned about the lack of redundancy for their virtual desktops, because if a VM goes down, it’s very costly, both in terms of troubleshooting and lost productivity. The company has strengthened their ability to avoid business disruption with Workspot’s industry-leading 99.95% reliability, day in and day out. In addition, innovative BC/DR features, including both intra- and inter-cloud region failover, plus standby Cloud PCs that activate with a single click in a disaster, are all elements of a strong business continuity plan.

Support

“When you build VDI on your own, it’s very difficult to know where to go for support and the vendor is not always responsive. With Workspot, we’re not having to deal with updating VMs, patching systems or troubleshooting infrastructure – we rely on Workspot for that.”  When customers do have questions Workspot support is widely known for its responsiveness and expertise.

What’s Next

For this company, implementing and managing the Workspot solution was the easiest part of the project. The biggest challenge?  Evangelizing the solution internally. Change is always viewed skeptically, and especially when engineers and other power users are faced with separation from their high-end workstations. However, we’ve heard it over and over: Once they try Workspot and experience the amazing performance and the freedom of using a lightweight end point, there is no going back!

Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how easy it is to simplify end user computing in your organization.

The post Conversations with Customers: Modernize VDI to Reduce Complexity, Scale Globally appeared first on Workspot.

Today we’re going to talk about cloud workstations on AMD GPUs in Microsoft Azure. Yep, there’s a Goldilocks Zone for cloud workstations! This is especially relevant for manufacturing and product design firms, because they have unique CAD/CAM/CAE requirements for a wide spectrum of high-performance computing capabilities. CAD engineers/designers need the ultimate performance for their graphics-intensive apps so they can stay productive and meet tough deadlines. Others on the design team have different requirements – they may review designs or present them to customers, which can be done with less compute power. Whatever their role in the organization, when your end users are in the Zone with Workspot and AMD, they have exactly the compute power they need – no more and no less, but “just right” for them and at the right price point for the business too.

Over-provisioning is Out; Precision Compute is In

We’ve talked quite a bit about the problem of over-provisioning, but this has always been in relation to over-provisioning server resources to accommodate on-premises VDI. The reason for this now-archaic practice is that on-prem VDI is difficult to scale, so to avoid being caught short on compute power in changing business conditions, having extra capacity on-hand was the only way to quickly overcome the scalability problem. Of course, it’s expensive to over-provision, because resources are sitting idle much of the time, so that money is wasted.

The VDI over-provisioning scenario is analogous to one of Goldilocks’s chairs (too big!), but more importantly to Cloud PCs and workstations when they can’t be properly sized. In the past you had two choices. You could select a Cloud PC using a CPU instance in Azure; great for some use cases, but many modern applications really need more horsepower. For something more performant, you had a second choice: a cloud workstation using a GPU instance in Azure. While offering a great high-performance experience for designers and engineers using demanding, graphics-intensive apps, using the entire GPU was overkill for many applications. In many cases, choice #2 was too big and too expensive (in Goldilocks-speak.) So, how can you right-size for each user experience and get into the Zone?

Balancing Cost and Performance

Until recently, IT teams were in an all-or-nothing situation with cloud GPUs. AMD changed that when they introduced GPU partitioning with its Radeon Instinct GPUs, which power NVv4 virtual machines in Azure. You’re no longer forced to deliver the entire GPU per virtual machine. With this innovation, for the first time, IT teams are able to more precisely match individual end user compute requirements with right-sized GPU power, because the AMD GPU could now be subdivided and a fraction of it  – whether 1/2, 1/4 or 1/8 of the GPU – assigned to each user according to their needs.

Workspot offers four cloud workstation configurations across the price/performance curve, from a full 16GB GPU for the most graphics-intensive work, down to a 1/8 fractional GPU.

With Workspot it’s easy to match the right compute power to each use case.

“With the new AMD-powered Workspot cloud workstations on Azure, we now offer several perfectly sized cloud workstations for our different workloads.” says Andy Knauf, CIO Mead & Hunt. “We’ve found the new entry level cloud workstation, using a fraction of the AMD GPU, is just right for our users running Microsoft Office 365 productivity tools and Adobe design tools (Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign). This fills in an additional much-needed point on the price/performance curve, which allows us to move even more users to the AMD-powered Workspot cloud workstations on Azure.”

Scott Funk of Global Finishing Solutions said, “The workstations are connected within the data center at a 40 gig-per-second back plane, so the server-to-workstation speed is not an issue. It’s been right from the get-go. We immediately heard from the team that this was working well.” Scott added, “The ultimate goal is to have the ability to tap into a workforce that we haven’t before. We want to support employees wherever they want to work.”

Freedom to work anywhere, plus amazing performance at the right price point is a win for everyone. As Andy puts it, “All our cloud workstations across the country are working as good or better than all those desktop machines we used to buy. How can you afford NOT to go to cloud workstations?”

How to Get Started with Workspot, AMD and Azure

Cloud PCs and workstations are about modernizing end user computing whether you are moving away from physical workstations or legacy VDI. The agility, security and productivity benefits of Workspot’s SaaS platform are compelling, and we’d love to share more details about that with you. We have deep experience with onboarding manufacturing and product design firms to Azure and with getting your end users up and running on Cloud PCs and workstations fast.

The Workspot SaaS Cloud PC platform was designed for operational simplicity while also meeting complex enterprise requirements. This is one of the many ways our solution is unique in the industry. You can get started with just a few cloud workstations; be sure to test them out with your most demanding power users! Our Customer Success team works with you on any fine-tuning needed to make sure your end users are happy. We’ve worked extensively with graphics-intensive apps including SolidWorks, AutoCad, Siemens NX and many more. Watch our video to see what Siemens NX looks like on a Workspot cloud workstation!

Siemens NX running on a Workspot cloud workstation powered by AMD on Azure.

One of our customers, Barge Design, decided to test Workspot cloud workstations with their most demanding CAD designers. This is often the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) strategy for new customers in the manufacturing and product design industries, because if CAD experts love their “Workspots” so will everyone else! At Barge the initial group participating in UAT was skeptical, but once they tried their cloud workstations they never looked back. ““Now I can’t imagine a day of work without Workspot,” says CAD designer Josh Caldwell. Once your most demanding end users are happy and you have proved the value of the solution, you’re ready to move to production rollout, which we take care of for you. Then you can spin up additional Cloud PCs and cloud workstations in minutes, in any cloud region globally. And you manage everything from a single pane of glass. The agility all these capabilities bring to the business is unprecedented, and it’s what helps drive business growth. Finally, our Customer Success Team continues an ongoing engagement with you, ensuring you can take advantage of new features and bringing new ideas to your team to ensure your long-term success.

Ready to find out how Workspot cloud workstations, powered by AMD on Azure can transform your organization? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how it works!

The post Cloud Workstations on AMD GPUs and Goldilocks. It’s No Fairytale! appeared first on Workspot.

Remote and Hybrid Work Trends

At Workspot, we hold webinars regularly, and I always include a series of polling questions. It’s interesting to see over time how the answers from attendees shift, giving us a good sense of what’s top of mind for people. One of the questions I always ask the audience is “Where is your primary work location?” Of course, you can guess that during the lockdown, the vast majority of people have been primarily working from home – upwards of 80% for much of the last 18 months. In the poll last week, it was notable that the numbers of people declaring the office as their primary work location have started to increase – about 36% in our audience poll, whereas the percent of people working primarily from home has dropped to 55%. Some people have always worked from home – about 9% in this poll. It seems that a cautious shift back to the office – part time – is taking place, and yet overwhelmingly people want (are demanding in many cases) the flexibility to work anywhere. I wanted to discuss the implications of that with Barge.

What can we learn from examining “a day in the life” of a Barge power user? Here are some of my key takeaways from our conversation.

Keep Your Data Close

Back in the day, Barge provided their designers with expensive, GPU-powered workstations. These high-end workstations are really a thing of beauty, until you have to carry it around or work remotely! In some cases Barge would double up on the hardware and provide people with a workstation at home too – then they would VPN in to the data to do their work. That’s when things get really dicey. Setting aside the cost of redundant hardware, performance problems, security risks and data integrity are all problems that arise with VPNs. For CAD designers/engineers working on huge 3D files, the distance to their data is critical because latency kills performance. This was all problematic before Covid, but now that most people will be working from home at least part time, the VPN approach is obsolete.

Traditional VDI is another approach to supporting remote work, but distance-to-your-data is still a problem. Anyone who is remote from that datacenter will probably be pretty unhappy with performance. Darn those laws of physics! Latency just is.

The Barge team knew they had to address the latency and data integrity challenges, so they got started by implementing Panzura controllers in some of their branch offices. This was the first step in moving data closer to end users, and it was a smart move. When they discovered Workspot, they took the next step: They moved their workstations to Microsoft Azure alongside a Panzura instance in Azure. What’s really bold about this step is that they started with the most difficult workload – their CAD power users who used the most GPU-intensive apps. That didn’t worry us at all, but that leap of faith by the Barge team would prove to be highly valuable to the business.

Achieve a Consistent User Experience

Some of the Barge designers were quite resistant to Workspot. “I was very suspect and resistant to Workspot initially,” said power user Josh Caldwell. The IT team worked closely with the initial group of cloud workstation adoptees to address their concerns – mainly about the “unknown.” Once these power users tried their cloud workstations, they never looked back. Josh goes on to say, “Now I can’t imagine a day of work without Workspot!” At this point, the days of over-provisioning hardware, worrying about data replication, and enduring lackluster performance over a VPN are over. The rollout of Workspot continued, with some of the strongest resisters to the change becoming the most vocal with their praise for their cloud workstations.

This takes us to March 2020 when everyone had to go home to work. Barge IT Director David Ferguson said, “It was business as usual.” We’ve heard this many times from our customers, and it never fails to astonish me. During the biggest business disruption in history, Workspot customers experienced “business as usual” when they sent people home to work. From the standpoint of the technology and the user experience, the shift to remote work was a non-event, because accessing and working on your cloud workstations is exactly the same great experience – no matter where you are working or what end point you are using. This is how productivity increased at Barge during this time. When people changed locations, nothing about their compute experience changed. It is always a consistent user experience, anywhere they need to work.

Infrastructure? Just Say “No”

Many organizations have branch offices for one reason or another, and buying and maintaining server infrastructure is no picnic. Barge has many branch offices, and it was a huge resource commitment to keep up on all that infrastructure, in addition to trying to keep laptops up to date with security patches.

With Workspot, all that cost and effort is history. There’s no infrastructure to deal with – Workspot has all of that covered. The last two branch offices Barge opened were totally server-less. You only need an internet connection and then you get to work right away on your cloud workstations. Hardware refreshes are history too, and older endpoints are new again when they access a Workspot Cloud PC or workstation. The Barge team is enjoying the freedom of having a lightweight device that is portable, so they can pick up and go wherever they need to work. “We are out of the hardware business,” said David Ferguson.

Be Ready for the Next Disruption

Because they have so many branch offices, Barge has been affected by natural disasters in the past. They have been in the difficult position of losing productivity when a whole fleet of PCs and workstations had to be replaced after a tornado. Worse, before Panzura, the data those people needed to keep working was just not available at any other location. Today, if bad weather in on the way, as long as the power is on and people are safe, they can get back to work using any device at hand, because apps and data are in the cloud. That’s an amazing thing when we’re talking about designers who cannot compromise on performance! The Barge teams calls out this greater business resiliency as a major benefit of Workspot and Panzura.

Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how it works!

The post Conversations with Customers: Hybrid Work Trends and Lessons Learned appeared first on Workspot.

The Covid pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated the transition to cloud computing, and the ability to get everyone home to work was made significantly easier where organizations had already transitioned completely or nearly completely to the cloud. To say this has been eye opening for IT and business leaders is an understatement, and as a result, most organizations have spent the last two years making all manner of improvements to their information technology infrastructure.

Where are we in the cloud journey?

One forward-thinking firm that decided to go all-in on the cloud almost eight years ago is the engineering firm of Mead & Hunt. The firm has 900 people, mainly design engineers, working out of 40 locations nationwide. Each year, their CIO Andy Knauf has conducted a survey of more than fifty other CIO friends to gauge how far along they are in their cloud journeys. The majority of the companies surveyed have between 100 and 500 employees, with most having between 6 and 50 locations.

When asked which issues were of greatest concern to them, their top four responses were:

• Security/cybersecurity
• Remote worker access to files
• Hyperscaler cloud infrastructure
• Disaster recovery

You can watch the one-demand webinar where Andy discusses the results when you have a little extra time – it’s well worth it. Even beyond Andy’s survey, in our conversations with organizations of all sizes, these concerns rise to the top of the priority list.

Knauf then asked how many were using Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) and 40% said they were. Reasons for not using DaaS included that it was perceived to be too expensive, that performance was inadequate, security was insufficient, or that their users wanted laptops and they wanted control over their own infrastructure.

60% said they had no hyperconverged infrastructure. The majority were using a combination of on-prem and Azure Active Directory. All but a few were currently using some hypervisor for server virtualization.

40% acknowledged that although they were using cloud services, they did not have a “cloud-first” strategy and 70% said that less than two-thirds of their office operation was in the cloud.

Knauf’s analysis is that those he surveyed want and need everything cloud computing can bring them, but the majority are barely underway in their journey to it, making his firm more the exception than the rule.

Where is the disconnect?

Andy Knauf admits he’s puzzled. “If Covid working-from-home didn’t convince you the cloud was the way to go,” he comments, “I’m not sure what it’s gonna take!”

He speaks of a conversation he had a few years ago with his controller who said, following a series of local disasters that included floods, a fire that burned their field office to the ground, and several hurricanes, that their insurance company had asked him how much it would cost to get them up and running in another office space if their current office space was destroyed. Knauf pointed out that he no longer needs to worry about that. “Why is this even a question anymore?” he asked.  Mead & Hunt has all their servers up on Azure, not on-premises, and every one of their employees is regularly working from home. Pointing out that Azure keeps their content replicated in multiple data centers, Knauf pointed out, “It’s gonna have to be a pretty bad disaster before we would lose everything.” In this way, the firm has positioned itself well in terms of stronger security, anywhere-productivity, as well as avoiding business disruption. Their cloud-first strategy and methodical execution against it has fulfilled their requirements in the 4 areas the survey revealed as top concerns.

Andy further points out that their company would lose a million dollars every day if their operations were to go down. Now that they are completely deployed in the cloud that should never happen. In the case of a cloud outage, Cloud PCs and cloud workstations can failover to another cloud region and people would continue working. In a more localized event, such as a fire or hurricane, people would simply go back to their home or some other facility that is safe and has network access and electrical power and get back to work. In any case, the business is up and running and people can be productive without any compromises.

Given the compelling success of Mead & Hunt’s cloud journey, Andy’s hope is that it inspires his fellow CIOs to follow suit.

What cloud-first success looks like

Beyond the conversion from on-prem to cloud, Andy Knauf also saw the opportunity to go from capital expenses (CapEx) to operational expense (OpEx) as a huge opportunity for his company. They haven’t purchased a server in four or five years, and they no longer buy high-powered workstations, preferring quality laptops with lower memory and onboard storage requirements. Knauf points out that their people are their biggest and most important investment and providing the tools to keep them working and help them be as productive as possible is what he’s there to do. As Andy Knauf points out, “Productivity pays the bills!” so there can be no performance compromises; the top priority was that with any new technology introduced, end users have to love it.

In 2013 all Mead & Hunt data was migrated to Panzura’s CloudFS file system. This award-winning global cloud file system lets even the largest organizations use the cloud like it’s a high performance, globally available data center, making data accessible and durable. Network core operations were on their way out of their own data center and into the cloud.

Going all-in on Workspot cloud workstations

In 2017 Andy Knauf turned his focus onto his user’s desktops. Many of the engineers had tremendous data compute, storage and transfer requirements and latency was, as always, their biggest drain on precious time. And, they traveled frequently creating a challenge in providing a consistent, quality user experience when people were at job sites or in a hotel and needing to work. Andy freely shares that an on-premises VDI implementation that held so much promise for solving some of these issues simply failed the end user productivity test. Poor performance reduced productivity by at least 20%, – the opposite of what they were trying to achieve – and power users were pretty unhappy with the solution

Andy then discovered Workspot and, in doing so, found a single solution to all these challenges. Workspot introduces a completely new end-user-computing paradigm, utility computing, enabled by its SaaS Cloud PC platform. The underlying architecture of the SaaS solution – the Workspot Desktop Control Fabric – is a cloud-native, globally distributed architecture that delivers Cloud PCs and workstations across globally distributed public cloud regions in minutes, while also enforcing Zero Trust Security policy. Today, the public cloud offers each customer the ability to run software in dozens of cloud regions worldwide – essentially every organization now has relatively local access to these data centers, and that’s the key to providing great performance to end users. These cloud regions are also interconnected using the best, fastest, and most reliable networks.

Workspot places Cloud PCs and cloud workstations in the public cloud region nearest to the user, dramatically reducing latency. “As long as you can get low latency,” points out Knauf, “you’re gonna have great performance. We now have a rock-solid system, and we can just plug in people wherever they’re at. I never have to worry about opening new offices. As long as there’s an Azure site within a couple of hundred miles, I’m good to go. And I think there’s more than 60 of them across the globe. So pretty much anywhere on the planet.”

Ready to learn more about how Cloud PCs and workstations are transforming end user computing? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how it works!

The post Is it Finally Time to Go All-in on the Cloud? appeared first on Workspot.

The question that used to encounter a consistent “no” seems to have finally garnered a consistent “yes”: Should people be allowed to work at home? When the pandemic hit, that question changed abruptly to: How can we support all our employees and contractors, no matter where they are working?

A Seismic Shift: Attitudes About Working From Home

In a recent press release, Gartner stated that “51% of global knowledge workers will be remote by the end of 2021,” and a Gallup survey in September found that 9 in 10 people want a hybrid workstyle. It seems clear that most people expect to continue working remotely at least part of the time. The case for doing so is even stronger when you consider that 77% say they are happier working from home and 75% are confident they are more productive there.

The reasons people prefer working from home include some you’d expect. On average they save 40 minutes commuting time each day. FlexJobs says the average person can save about $4000 per year by working remotely –  money saved on gas, lunches out, clothing and more. That’s a big number, and this article in Forbes points out that in addition to saving money, replacing the time it takes to get ready to go to the office plus a long commute with extra sleep and extra work boosts employees’ overall health and happiness even further.

With the Great Resignation underway, employees are calling the shots. Working remotely is here to stay.

Next question: Are you ready for long-term WFH?

Based on these and other survey results it’s clear WFH is here to stay. The increase in productivity is simply undeniable, and the company’s potential cost reductions have only begun to emerge.

Are you ready to support WFH and ensure it’s a workstyle that adds value to your organization?

Especially if you work in a large enterprise, it’s time to examine whether the available global infrastructure is ready to consistently handle the load with so many of your people working from home all or at least part of the time. Assuring resilient connectivity and minimal operating disruption is only part of the equation.

One of the challenges will be that the answer to the readiness question goes well beyond your own infrastructure.

Is the cloud ready?

If you ask companies how they were able to transition to WFH so quickly back in March 2020, some will give credit to their IT operation teams who had already transitioned many of their current resources to the cloud. Leveraging cloud infrastructure enabled many companies to relocate their personnel more swiftly while still providing robust access to business critical applications and data. Secure access, while a challenge at first, became more and more viable as time went on.

Today, as we begin to plan for a time beyond Covid we must also plan for an infrastructure beyond our own. How can we more effectively leverage the cloud as it exists today to provide the platform we’ll all need to propel our businesses forward?

To illustrate our own answer to this challenge, we spoke recently with Andy Knauf, CIO of engineering firm Mead & Hunt with more 900 employees located in more than 40 locations, and Petra Davidson, VP at Panzura, providers of “the most secure and easy-to-use cloud data management platform on the planet.”

Simplifying data access – Panzura in the cloud

Panzura’s award-winning global cloud file system CloudFS lets even the largest organizations use the cloud like it’s a high performance, globally available data center, making data accessible and durable without making copies. In this webinar, you can learn more about how Panzura and Workspot cloud solutions are game changers for organizations who use graphics-intensive apps.

Network-Attached Storage (NAS), the data storage mainstay for nearly 3 decades, is struggling to cope with escalating storage volumes. NAS is highly performant when situated close to the users accessing the files it stores, but becomes unworkably slow when remote users attempt to access it. Panzura’s CloudFS transforms complex, multi-component, and often multi-vendor environments into a simplified data management solution, while addressing cost reduction, risk mitigation, and operational complexity.

Panzura’s global cloud file system CloudFS provides a single authoritative data set held in cloud object storage, with immediate global data consistency and local-feeling file performance across all locations. Data from all legacy storage instances is consolidated, de-duped and compressed, significantly reducing the overall unstructured data footprint.

Delivering business agility – Workspot Cloud PCs

Workspot invented a completely new end-user-computing utility model, enabled by the Workspot Desktop Control Fabric, a cloud-native, globally-distributed architecture that allows horizontal scalability across cloud regions in minutes. Today, the public cloud offers each customer the ability to run software in dozens of cloud regions worldwide – essentially every organization now has local access to these global data centers. These cloud regions are also connected using the best, fastest, and most reliable networks.

Just as Panzura performs far better the nearer it is physically located to the users, Workspot similarly provides significantly less latency by locating Cloud PCs in the cloud location nearest the user. Register for our webinar to hear what our customers think about this powerful solution.

IT teams, after choosing one or more public clouds, can leverage their technology choices for PC management tools and other processes, such as; security solutions, identity management, and multi-factor authentication. Our enterprise-proven, SaaS Cloud PC solution features multi-cloud support, customizable everything and exceptional performance. Together, these capabilities enable organizations to achieve unprecedented levels of business agility, which drives opportunity and growth.

Realworld: Workspot and Panzura Serve Mead & Hunt

Many of Mead & Hunt’s engineering professionals worked from their homes long before the Covid pandemic made it necessary. Their CIO, Andy Knauf, points out that they’ve been using Panzura since 2013 and Workspot since 2018, a combination he describes as “a great solution!”

Knauf explains that Panzura first led them to moving all their data up to the cloud. Then, as more engineers started wanting to work from home they found Workspot made it easy for them to deliver the kind of performance CAD engineers needed with the large files they had to frequently manipulate. “Thanks to Panzura,” explains Knauf, “we no longer needed to make remote users go back to on-prem servers, they could hit the cloud servers instead.”

His next challenge was to consistently provide excellent performance no matter where the engineer was located. By provisioning each user’s Workspot cloud workstation in the Azure region nearest to the user, this consistently delivered a low latency response time of 50 milliseconds or less – a great user experience.

“As long as you can get low latency,” points out Knauf, “you’re gonna have great performance. We now have a rock-solid system, and we can just plug in people wherever they’re at. I never have to worry about any new office anywhere. As long as there’s an Azure site within a couple of hundred miles, I’m good to go. And I think there’s 60 of them across the globe. So pretty much anywhere on the planet.”

The Planetary Cloud – A Re-Imagined Global Infrastructure

The key to the future infrastructure keeps the data in the cloud at all times. Panzura makes the cloud a global NAS capable of managing the data and distributing it to wherever it needs to be, keeping the most frequently used data in every location. Similarly, Workspot keeps the end user’s desktop image at that location for rapid, sub-50-millisecond delivery. The applications and data never leave the cloud. Instead, Workspot Cloud PCs provide remote access to users, where the only network traffic comes from compressed images of the desktop, keystrokes, and mouse movements. Users experience performance that rivals, and often exceeds, local area network performance.

To learn how your user community, working from wherever, can experience full access to all workloads with incredibly low latency and incredibly high resilience, schedule a demo and we’ll show you how it works!

The post Re-imagining Infrastructure to Support Remote Working appeared first on Workspot.

Cloud Desktop Simplicity is Genius

At Workspot, we have a slightly different take on KISS: We prefer “Simplicity is Genius.” Simplicity is the cornerstone of our innovative Cloud Desktop Fabric architecture, which we built specifically for the massive scalability the distributed public cloud makes possible today for enterprises. While we have dramatically simplified deployment and operation of virtual desktops, we recognize and address the complex needs for many use cases in large enterprises.

Whether you’re considering giving up physical desktops and workstations in favor of cloud desktops and workstations, or you want to eliminate complexity by moving away from on-premises VDI, you’re making the right strategic move for positioning your company well for the future.

In our collective experience working with thousands of customers on VDI projects back in the day, one of the most confounding considerations when it comes to virtual desktops is how to decide whether to go with persistent desktops or non-persistent desktops. Workspot supports both persistent and non-persistent desktop pools on Microsoft Azure and on Google Cloud, but we’ll argue the case that 80% of use cases can (and should) be solved with persistent cloud desktops.

Let’s explore some myths and truths to show you why.

What’s a Persistent Desktop?

Many of you have been in the VDI world for a long time too, but let’s make sure we are on the same page with some definitions:

Persistent desktops are “dedicated to a user” in terms of user entitlement. In terms of state, all files and user installed apps are persisted in the virtual desktop itself. Settings are preserved across reboots and the desktop experience is similar to that of a physical PC. Typically, these desktops are managed using PC management tools such as Microsoft SCCM and Intune.

Power users, designers, developers, and executives are all common user types for persistent desktops. These users need fast login, 100% application compatibility and full administrative control over the desktop.

Non-persistent desktops are “floating” in terms of user entitlement so that any user in the entitled group can connect to a specific desktop based on availability. The desktop state is discarded at regular intervals to keep the desktops stateless, and there are a few ways to execute this. A stateless desktop can be implemented in various ways. For example, the desktop can be deleted and recreated every time a user logs-off, or it can be refreshed when users log-off, or at regular intervals, perhaps every night or even once a week depending upon company policies. The high-level idea is to patch the master image with updates periodically and push that image to all the users on a regular basis to keep the desktops stateless.

Kiosk or lab environments typically need non-persistent desktops. University labs, hospital kiosks, and call centers are examples of common industry use-cases for non-persistent desktops.

You can purchase add-on technologies that help personalize non-persistent desktops, so user settings and even files can be preserved between user sessions, making the desktops feel like persistent desktops even though the virtual machines are stateless.

There are also various products that move the user profile to a network location, and there are “layering” technologies that allow dynamic mapping of apps to users of non-persistent desktops. So, there are a plethora of options when it comes to addressing virtual desktop personalization.

Persistent Desktops vs Non-Persistent Desktops at-a-Glance

Industry Myths About Persistent and Non-Persistent Desktops

There are myths around the capabilities and benefits of persistent vs. non persistent desktops that make it difficult for IT decision makers to gain clarity about the best approach for meeting their requirements. Here are a few:

Myth 1: Security is better with non-persistent desktops

Non-persistent desktops in their purest form discard all the user state at user logoff. The user gets a clean desktop on every login and the base image is patched frequently. The desktops are also locked down (no administrative privileges) and only a few applications are available to the end users. In such deployments, it is correct that non-persistent desktops are more secure. The big caveat though, is that this 100% stateless desktop is only applicable to a narrow set of use cases.

With network profiles and layering technologies, non-persistent desktops are technically stateful in nature. The desktops retain all the state on the network or on a writable volume. So, is IT scanning all the user profiles for downloaded content? What is the anti-virus and anti-malware policy for such desktops? If the desktop is assembled on-the-fly, with “stateful” user layers, the security benefits of stateless desktops no longer apply.

Myth 2: Non-persistent desktops with layers simplify management of desktops

In a perfect world, IT would only have to handle a couple of applications, the OS image would be patched at fixed monthly or quarterly intervals, and the pools would have tens of thousands of desktops. If your use case is served by one golden image, and the packaging overhead is minimal, then life could be pretty simple.

The reality, however, is that a typical enterprise has hundreds or thousands of applications that need to be updated frequently. Additionally, IT teams often have strict requirements for handling critical patches. In this scenario, having one process for dealing with physical PCs and a second process for dealing with virtual desktops is adding complexity. How many base images are required? Is application layering mandatory to reduce the number of golden images? Do you want to support user installed apps? Who do you call when an application crashes? What kind of apps cannot be packaged in a layer – what about the vendor’s guest agent itself?

Application virtualization techniques such as isolation and layering are touted as the best way to simplify desktop management. But how many consoles are required to implement non-persistent pools with application layers, UEM and profiles? How many databases and load balancers are required to deploy the first desktop pool? What changes are required when you have to deploy desktops at a new global site? How many desktops should be in the pool and how many apps need to be packaged before a company will see real benefits? What kind of effort will you need to exert to “package” and “test” applications for compatibility? What about the performance overhead associated with application layering? Layers are embedded into the images at boot time and in some cases when the user logs in or when the application is launched.

You may think of “stateless” as being the holy grail, but in reality, it’s very hard to achieve truly stateless desktops and the proof points are not there. For most customers with limited IT staff, there are diminishing returns if every application in the company has to be converted to a new format and expensive consultants are required to implement “user layers”. When you double click and begin examining all these questions, you realize that there are (too) many steps required for deploying your first non-persistent desktop.

Persistent Cloud Desktops are Ideal for the Majority of Use Cases

Myth 3: Non-persistent desktops improve storage performance

Storage was the first big bottleneck for VDI adoption. Various vendors introduced non-persistent desktops using linked clones with a shared base OS disk to make sure that the read performance/boot storms are addressed with heavy caching on every host in the cluster.

Now with modern cloud architectures, every VM is guaranteed enough read/write IOPS to handle all sorts of IO storms. Thin or shadow clones have made linked-clones completely redundant. With all-flash arrays and widespread adoption of hyper-convergence and modern per-host caching in hypervisors, storage is not considered a bottleneck anymore. So, in 2012 better storage performance was a valid argument for adopting non-persistent desktops, but it’s not applicable anymore.

Myth 4: Non-persistent desktops will result in lower cloud costs

It’s typical that the quest for the lowest price per virtual desktop seat involves configuring your virtual desktop environment with as many users as possible sharing as few resources as possible. That would seem to be simple math. So, what can effectively be shared? Instead of a dedicated Windows 10 OS VM with a certain level of CPU, memory, storage and networking speed per user – you would share several Windows Server OS VMs with much larger amounts of those same resources for all of your users to share. How many servers will you need and how many users can you put on each server? Depends on the applications being used and their appetite for resources. It’s a tradeoff between user performance and overall experience – and the cost of all those servers. Save money by squeezing more users on to one server, and then spend more money when the users complain about slow performance. Now you add the additional software cost and complexity to manage the user profiles and app layering and you’re nearing the cost of a persistent cloud desktop per user, especially when the users require rich applications, full browser-based multimedia experiences and collaboration tools. With all the complexity you just added to your non-persistent desktops to make it a reasonable experience for all your users, it will be tough to make the case that your costs are lower than a persistent desktop.

The Unconventional Wisdom of Persistent Cloud Desktops

The notion of packaging every application in a separate layer and maintaining separate processes for patching physical PCs and virtual desktops has led to very high IT overhead. Application virtualization was once promised as a panacea in the industry and despite a lot of promise it never achieved mainstream adoption. It is rarely used for 100% of the applications in an organization. Application layering is on the same path. Maintaining separate processes and IT staff for VDI functions has become a big problem for CIOs. This is why we believe we’ll continue to see adoption of non-persistent desktops decline.

CIOs are turning to the cloud in droves. If simplicity is truly important, you need persistent desktops in the cloud! Workspot reinvented VDI as a SaaS solution for enterprises to eliminate the complexity for which VDI Has always been notorious. While it’s simple to deploy and operate, we support a wide variety of cloud desktop configurations to suit every use case and type of user. Workspot non-persistent use cases will make sense for a small number of use cases, while the vast majority can benefit like never before from persistent cloud desktops that support your Zero Trust Security policy, reduce IT overhead, and provide the flexibility to scale instantly to keep up with business demands. Sophisticated business continuity options help you avoid business disruptions and keep the business going strong when disaster strikes.

That’s our case for persistent cloud desktops! Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how it works.

The post Making the Case for Persistent Cloud Desktops appeared first on Workspot.