IT Kryptonite or Low-Latency Cloud PCs?
If we think about the many known problems with on-premises VDI as well as its latest incarnation as a cloud-hosted solution, IT teams and end users alike are affected, and everyone struggles to try to make legacy virtual desktops work for them. With on-premises VDI, slow performance essentially kills user acceptance, and it has been a non-starter in settings where high-performance computing capabilities are needed, such as in life sciences, engineering, and manufacturing use cases where CAD is used. For IT teams, complexity is the kryptonite, even when we’re talking about cloud-based VDI brokers, because you have to apply expensive, highly-skilled people to deploy and micro-manage these implementations. Simplicity is a foreign concept for legacy VDI, and that means you’ll be grappling with high OpEx that relentlessly increases over time.
You may have heard us talk about low-latency cloud PCs. If you don’t have time to read this blog post, jump over to our 4-minute video now for an explanation! If you have a few more minutes, let’s examine the key differences with low-latency cloud PCs that are going to completely change your world.
Low-Latency is a Superpower!
Blazing Fast for Users
The antidote to user resistance, the low latency that public cloud ubiquity offers means that all of your users, no matter where they reside around the world, can be 50ms or less away from their cloud PC. Today we support 84 cloud regions – 60 Microsoft Azure regions plus 24 Google Cloud regions – and growing! Each time a new cloud region is introduced, Workspot is there on day one. Because of this, cloud PCs can be placed very close to every user. Workspot customers regularly report between 2-20ms latency between the user and their cloud PC – a rate that humans cannot even perceive. We’ve also measured the bandwidth out of the cloud PC. For example, the cloud PC might be talking to a SaaS application such as Salesforce or Zoom over Azure or Google Cloud, and we’re seeing very high speeds – as high as 2Gbps upload and download speeds. Plus the Azure and Google Cloud backplane bandwidth is 30 Gbps to 1 Tbps across the globe! That’s a far cry from your office internet speeds, and it’s why many of our customers are surprised to see that cloud desktops and workstations often outperform their physical counterparts.
Overall, this makes for an outstanding user experience for everyone, creating an environment for maximum productivity. This is especially notable now that so many people are working from home.
A Turnkey Service that’s Actually Turnkey (Really.)
Simple to Deploy, Simple to Operate
Workspot cloud PCs are not those other vendors’ idea of “turnkey”. If you want your valuable IT people spending time micro-managing virtual desktops and you want to own all the reliability issues that arise, then Workspot is not for you. “Simple to deploy, Simple to operate” is our mantra. Our entire reason for reinventing VDI for the cloud era was to save you from the mess that is legacy VDI. Plopping it into the cloud doesn’t change anything – all the complexity and all the scalability limitations are still there. Our cloud PC platform is cloud-native – we built it to take advantage of the massive scale and elasticity of the public cloud. Our turnkey service deploys globally, across multiple clouds and cloud regions in days and scales in minutes, whether you need 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 more cloud desktops and workstations when a new business opportunity arises.
Unlike an engagement with a Managed Service Provider, your IT team stays in control and can see everything that’s happening through a single admin console. Workspot takes full responsibility for the cloud desktop SLA. Reliability is on us – there’s no finger pointing because we invented our cloud PC platform from the ground up and we run it ourselves in the public cloud – for you. We lead the industry with 99.95% + uptime (it’s often even better!), so you don’t have to worry.
Optimal Price/Performance for the Business
The fact that we support both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud means you have choices. You’re going to have low latency and therefore, great performance with either cloud vendor, and knowing that, you can fine-tune your implementation based on other parameters. The economics vary between clouds and even between a vendor’s cloud regions. Workspot offers you the flexibility to immediately take advantage of new cloud regions as they go live, and to access the cloud resources that are best suited for each of your use cases. This agility is an important element of your cloud desktop success formula.
Real-Time Global Monitoring via the NOC
High-availability and amazing performance for users is job #1 at Workspot. Because we are a first-party service – meaning we built the cloud PC platform and we operate the service ourselves – there are a couple of major benefits for you that no other vendor can deliver. We monitor system behavior in real-time, 24×7 across the globe through our Network Operations Center (NOC) and we gather and analyze data from all the underlying components of the platform. The first benefit for you is that we can immediately observe issues that your users may be experiencing and take action quickly. The goal is to be able to anticipate issues that may affect your usage more broadly, and defend against that. Most often we see problems that are outside the Workspot platform itself, but how cool is it that we have the opportunity to alert you proactively and help you respond quickly?! This is a primary area of focus for our development team – to constantly improve our ability to anticipate issues before they result in downtime for our customers.
The second major benefit of the NOC is that because we have the ability to take a big data approach to system behavior and performance, we’re also able to constantly implement system enhancements. Everything we learn from our customer deployments, from customer feature requests and from the NOC gets fed back into the product development and enhancement process which is tightly focused on simplifying the service through intelligent automation and continually enhancing availability and performance. The ultimate goal is maintaining our close partnership with each customer to add value to your overall business SLA.
Does this sound like the kind of service that would alleviate pressure on your IT team, so they can work on more strategic projects? Does reducing OpEX and being able to predict your end user computing costs sound good too? If so, let’s connect. Don’t settle for VDI – we’re ready to shield you from the kryptonite!
It’s easy to schedule a demo – we’ll show you our cloud PC platform and discuss your needs. Let us know how we can help!
