Are you feeling dissatisfied with your current VDI provider? Perhaps you’re facing one or more of the following challenges:

• looking to improve the performance, management, and observability of your on-prem virtual apps and desktops?
• dealing with too many non-productive, dissatisfied end-users?
• coming up to a renewal and looking for a more friendly and flexible alternative?
• forced to pay luxury tax?
• looking at inflexible contract terms?
• paying for functionality you are not using or cannot use?
• getting less support or losing service and support altogether?
• not big enough to move to the cloud?
• suddenly facing a new account relationship with another company?
• needing to purchase a 3rd party monitoring/DEX tool to gain proper insight into your VDI?
• feeling a lack of focus and attention from your current provider?

If any of the above points ring familiar, I suggest you give Workspot a look. For your VDI using on-premises VMs, there is no better solution than Workspot’s enterprise VDI platform engineered for simplicity. Powerful yet easy to manage, no other VDI solution offers greater end-user performance, reliability, and in-depth IT understanding via deep observability tools than Workspot. And Workspot’s VDI is not held back by top-heavy, expensive VDI solutions that are not designed for efficient, seamless migration to the cloud when you’re ready for that.

Above and beyond the architectural limitations of traditional VDI approaches, other factors are now creating massive uncertainty around customer relationships, pricing, service & support, and company focus on customers. At Workspot, our lone purpose is to delight our customers with the best end-to-end enterprise VDI platform for on-premises and hybrid VDI using any cloud of your choice, anywhere in the world, all managed by a single, unified management and control console.

So ……. What do you have to lose? We offer an easy process to see a demo and if you like what you see, take a risk-free test drive of Workspot’s VDI on a small initial subset of your own traffic. I’m confident you will like what you see!

Want to learn more? Download a copy of our new asset, Embrace the Future of VDI, and find out how you can quickly make your end-users much happier while your VDI life gets much easier!

The post Not Happy with Your Current VDI Provider? Now is the time to move to Workspot! appeared first on Workspot.

Digital experience (DEX) monitoring and management has emerged as a growing area of IT focus for organizations looking to maintain a high level of end-user productivity and satisfaction, especially with today’s widely distributed workforces. With so many people working from home or at the very least in a hybrid office/home/remote manner, IT teams are challenged to make sure everyone stays satisfied with their end-user digital experience. This is especially true for organizations using VDI for remote workers, call centers, CAD/CAM designers, targeted app “task workers”, temporary or contract workers, etc.

Workspot’s enterprise VDI platform engineered for simplicity employs unique and powerful observability tools, integrated into the platform at no additional cost, to maintain unsurpassed levels of end-user productivity and satisfaction. These tools, called Workspot Watch and Workspot Trends, allow for deep real-time insight into every active VDI session across the enterprise, as well as in-depth ongoing historical tracking of all VDI sessions over time. While there are many 3rd party DEX monitoring tools available today that essentially sit “outside” the VDI platform to watch what is happening and respond with events and alarms, Workspot Watch and Trends allow IT teams to see and understand what is happening across the VDI estate to quickly respond to any problems that may arise, and in many cases thwart problems before they ever become evident to end-users. Workspot Watch even includes a quick questionnaire at the conclusion of each session to gain even greater clarity on the current level of end-user satisfaction.

The historical info gathered and displayed by Workspot Trends enables a keen understanding of what is happening across the VDI estate to help ensure end-users stay productive and happy over time, regardless of the various dynamics that can occur on an enterprise-wide network that includes a variety of devices and functions like gateways, routers, load balancers, data bases, virtual machines, brokers, app stores, DNS servers, etc.

In short, external DEX monitoring tools do a good job of watching and notifying when an end-user may be experiencing a problem. Workspot’s observability features empower IT to notice current or impending problems, understand them, and rapidly respond with the correct remedy to minimize or in some cases fully mitigate problems for end-users quickly and clearly.

It’s proactive problem protection and rapid resolution at its finest, and only possible with advanced observability features integrated inside the cloud-native VDI platform. To learn more, I encourage you to check out our new asset, Workspot Observability.

And if you’d like to see Workspot in action, feel free to request a demo.

The post Workspot Observability for Productive, Happy End-Users appeared first on Workspot.

On their website, Starlink says customers can expect download speeds of 20-100mbps with latency around 25-50ms. Compare this with conventional satellite Internet which can be 600ms+, making high-performance computing (HPC) and other high data-rate activities that are essential for business – such as video calls – unbearable. SpaceX plans to launch up to 42,000 satellites and, as of December 2022, has reached one million subscribers worldwide.

This all sounds great, but the big question I had was “Will it work with a Cloud PC?” In this blog I’ll share my first-hand experience.

Starlink to the Rescue

For years I have used cable broadband as my primary Internet connection for both work and personal web activities. My current cable broadband subscription provides 1200MB of throughput. That is enough bandwidth for my family to use Cloud PCs, a VPN (for non-cloud PC users), music and video streaming and all of the IoT devices that are becoming more and more common. Everything works great until it doesn’t.

My neck of the woods near the ocean gets a lot of wind and it isn’t uncommon for a storm to knock out cable broadband service to my house. My spouse and I work from home exclusively, so when the Internet is down, all work stops. Our home is near the bottom of a hill and cellular service is spotty at best, rendering wireless LTE Internet useless as a backup. There have been several occasions where my family had to pack up and find a hotel with Internet service. This is expensive and disruptive. All that changed when Starlink came to our home.

My Experience with Cloud PCs on Starlink

I wasn’t sure what to expect once Starlink was online. Would I be able to access my Cloud PC? Would it be reliable or would my Cloud PC disconnect while I was working? What about Microsoft Teams? I use it all day long for collaboration and video calls; how would it perform? My concerns were unfounded. From the moment I launched my Cloud PC using Starlink I could see no difference in the experience when compared to cable broadband. I have been using Starlink exclusively for Cloud PC access for several months and I am consistently delighted with the performance. Mouse movement is smooth, watching videos is seamless, and even Teams video calls perform as well as with my cable broadband subscription. I have to admit, I was pretty surprised and really impressed.

High-Performance Cloud PCs with Starlink

As a Sales Engineer for Workspot, my personal experience led me directly to “how can our customers benefit from Starlink and our Cloud PCs?” In my world, we talk a lot about latency because poor end user experience is a primary reason why many of our customers decided to move away from traditional VDI solutions. When you have an end user computing solution that is expensive, complex to manage and troubleshoot and your end users are complaining about how slow it is, every day is not a great day for IT.

Workspot Cloud PCs change all that. Customers get simplified management and end users love the performance.  We really shine in HPC use cases. The performance is outstanding because Cloud PCs and workstations are placed in the cloud region closest to the end user (low latency!), and CAD users are finally free to work wherever and whenever they want. When we add Starlink into the equation, I can see huge benefits for organizations who have employees working remotely in the field, such as construction, oil & gas, first responders to natural disasters, or even home healthcare workers in rural areas. Starlink may be a great solution to deliver high-speed Internet directly to the jobsite. Users in the field can connect to Cloud PCs to access critical AutoCAD documents and design and architecture files, survey damage and process images, and examine patient records, as well as collaborate in real time with colleagues using Teams and Zoom.

Go All-in On Starlink?

The photos below show my ‘Dishy McFlatface’ or ‘Dishy’ for short (Starlink’s name for the receiver). The first photo shows Dishy on the ground. Notice the nearby broadband cable on the ground after a particularly fierce windstorm blew the cable off a utility pole. It took a couple of days for the provider to reconnect our service and we relied on Starlink during this period. The second photo is Dishy mounted on its forever home, a steel pole.

For now we will keep cable broadband service in addition to Starlink, but I can envision a time in the future where we cut the cord and use Starlink exclusively for our Internet needs, especially since Starlink is so brilliantly performant when using a Cloud PC.

Want to learn more about why all types of end users love their Workspot Cloud PCs? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how it works!

The post Starlink and Workspot Cloud PCs? A Match Made in Space! appeared first on Workspot.

It has been stated thousands of times through the years, “Change presents opportunities.” The ability to adapt to change is a key advantage in business. To survive, compete, and win, enterprises must adapt. However, because change can be disruptive and expensive, organizations tend to resist it, and few are prepared to consistently take advantage of the opportunities that change presents.

An emerging competitive advantage is leveraging cloud-based desktop virtualization, also known as Cloud PCs. What is new today often becomes core tomorrow, and we strongly believe that organizations should be looking to Cloud PCs as their next competitive advantage.

In the Beginning…

In 2002, server virtualization was born. VMware emerged as the category king with the release of their hypervisor, ESX Server. Server virtualization forever changed the IT landscape by allowing businesses to consolidate multiple servers onto fewer physical servers, boosting performance, streamlining IT administration, and reducing costs. As time went on, more vendors jumped into the space: In 2007, Citrix introduced XenServer; a year later in 2008, Microsoft entered the arena with Hyper-V.

With servers being virtualized, desktops came next. On-prem Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has been around since the early 2000s and really started taking root in 2006, with the release of VMware’s Virtual Desktop Manager (later renamed View and then Horizon), and the Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop offerings (later rebranded Citrix Virtual App and Desktops). Microsoft entered the space in 2008 with the introduction of Hyper-V.

Just as server virtualization changed the way technologists built and implemented infrastructure technology, and most importantly, how they strategized around it to support the growth of the business, they are now finally able to do the same with desktop virtualization.

What are the Main Types of Desktop Virtualization?

The three most popular types of desktop virtualization:

• Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
• Remote desktop services (RDS)
• Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS)

Cloud vs. On-Prem

By transitioning virtual desktops to the cloud, in lieu of being managed and deployed locally, companies can quickly realize all the promised benefits of centralized management, improved data security, simplified deployment, and scalability. The other opportunities, like Cloud PCs and cloud workstations, afford IT organizations is the ability to put the compute as close to the user as possible, thereby reducing latency, improving end-user performance, and providing a great user experience.

Gone are the days of technology groups being in the hardware business. It is extremely costly to keep up with the computing demands of software, especially GPU requirements. You no longer need to schedule maintenance windows and spend countless hours in the middle of the night swapping and upgrading hardware. With a few clicks of your mouse, you can add CPU, RAM, hard disk space, and so on.

Your CapEx cost now becomes OpEx, and as employees transition in and out of the business, you can configure the virtual desktop to their specific needs. You no longer need to have piles of physical computers sitting idle on a shelf waiting for the “right” user to come along.

As a technologist supporting your business, utilizing Cloud PCs will enable the business and your HR team to consider candidates from a worldwide talent pool. They will be able to hire anybody in the world to work from anywhere and from any device. Talk about a competitive advantage!

Risk Considerations

There is always risk associated with compute that a business must consider, plan for, and most importantly, strategize around – for both on-prem and in the cloud. It sometimes feels like (speaking from my previous life) as an IT leader, you are constantly trading one set of issues and concerns for another. However, the many rewards that organizations can realize by moving desktop workloads to the cloud far outweigh the risks.

Conclusion

A cloud-based desktop virtualization implementation will only be successful if you develop a clear vision and strategy to meet your organization’s current and future business goals. Just like it was in the early 2000’s with server virtualization, it is more than just turning on or spinning up a virtual desktop in your cloud tenant; the right strategy is key.

Related Resources

In case you want to revisit them, here are the first two posts in our digital transformation blog series:

• The New Adaptive Enterprise Competitive Advantage: Cloud PCs
• Cloud PCs Are a Strategic Imperative NOW

Stay tuned as we continue to dive deeper!

The post The Shift from On-Premises to Cloud-Based Desktop Virtualization appeared first on Workspot.

Around the world, enterprises wrestle with change. To stay competitive, organizations need to make large-scale changes quickly and efficiently.

Here are a few examples:

• An insurance company needs to streamline its claims processing workflow using digital imaging technologies to capture, share, and store information
• An architectural firm needs to work with graphically intensive applications in the field
• A manufacturer is expanding and needs to tap into additional talent pools across the globe
• A bank needs to provide “Day One” access to information systems and applications for new employees as part of an acquisition
• A call center must move thousands of workers home due to a pandemic

Today’s Top Business Imperative: Adaptability

How quickly can your business identify and respond to change? Can you leverage change and turn it to your advantage? Becoming a Cloud PC-enabled adaptive enterprise can help you improve your responses to both questions. Business and IT teams can capitalize on change in a Cloud PC-enabled adaptive enterprise. When IT moves from the typical inflexible, costly, silo-like architectures of the past to a shared, service-oriented, multi-cloud solution provider, they deliver more value to the business.

Rather than acting as an obstacle to change, IT becomes the business enabler to:

• Maximize return. Improve business results. Grow revenue and earnings. Increase cash flow. Reduce the cost of operations – short and long term.
• Mitigate risk. Ensure the security and continuity of internal and external business operations. Minimize exposure to external risk factors, such as security threats and availability issues. Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Recover automatically from virtually any failure – instantly.
• Improve performance. Optimize the performance of business operations across the enterprise from end to end. Gain a holistic, real-time view of the Cloud PC environment across clouds – and use that view to monitor service levels, avoid risks, and streamline IT operations.
• Increase agility. Enable your company and operations to quickly adapt to changing business needs and capitalize on emerging opportunities. Provide timely IT support for business innovation. An effective multi-cloud and hybrid architecture with business process models reduces costs and makes it easier to address new business priorities and integrate new technologies.

The New Meaning of “Business As Usual”

Business as usual has long implied the absence of change, where things today are much as they were yesterday and the day before. However, business leaders today understand that just the opposite is true: Business as usual is now all about change. It is not about maintaining a static state; it’s about operating successfully in a dynamic state where change is the norm, not the exception.

Here are some key factors that have led to this shift:

• The rate of change has greatly accelerated over the past 20 years. Some product lines that once had a viable lifespan of 20 years or more may now have a lifespan of fewer than seven years, with the lifespan of individual products sometimes lasting less than a single year.
• The scope of change has expanded. An entertainment company no longer only focuses on introducing a film for distribution to theaters. Now it plans for distribution globally through a combination of streaming platforms and theaters, or perhaps just straight to streaming.
• The enablers of change have proliferated. New technologies appear daily to help improve internal and external processes; foster new relationships with suppliers, vendors, and customers; and provide new ways of delivering goods and services. The cloud itself has become one of the greatest enablers of change – increasing flexibility and agility, and opening up new avenues for creativity and innovation. Given these game-changing benefits and more, it’s no surprise that more than 90% of today’s organizations have adopted cloud computing in some manner. The cloud has also expanded the source and impact of competitive threats, because challenges can arise from anywhere without warning.

How to Quickly Evolve Your Enterprise to WIN!

The enterprise that can respond rapidly to new opportunities and threats, introduce goods and services at a pace that a changing market demands, and move nimbly into new markets and geographies, will outperform the enterprise that cannot adapt as quickly. Indeed, those organizations that cannot adapt quickly face significant penalties. For example, in some industries, a six-month delay in product introduction can reduce lifetime product revenue by 30% or more; in other industries, a six-month delay could cause the enterprise to miss the window of opportunity entirely.

To thrive in a world where business as usual is all about change requires a new kind of enterprise, one designed to evolve quickly and easily to respond to and foster change, and then turn it into a competitive advantage.

At Workspot, we help our customers evolve into an adaptive enterprise by transforming end-user computing into an IT service through:

1. Go-Live Deployment Services that ensure Cloud PC success and deliver fast time-to-value
2. Industry experts who guide your ongoing cloud journey and end-user computing transformation
3. The enablement of agile development to address customer-generated feature requests and drive ongoing product innovation
4. Highly responsive support personnel whose top priority is your business uptime

Through our Enterprise Desktop Cloud platform, Workspot has completely reinvented end-user computing for the modern enterprise. There has never been a better opportunity to achieve higher levels of business agility to drive competitive advantage. Dramatically simplified desktop management with exceptional performance that both IT teams and end-users love – this completes the picture of the new adaptive enterprise, always ready to navigate emerging challenges and opportunities. Workspot will be with you every step of the way!

Ready to see Workspot in action? Schedule a demo!

The post The New Adaptive Enterprise Competitive Advantage: Cloud PCs appeared first on Workspot.

But what exactly is a cloud PC? And what should you look for in a cloud PC solution if you’re an organization that has employees and contractors distributed all over the world?

What is a Cloud PC?

Essentially a cloud PC (or cloud desktop, whichever term you prefer) is a virtual desktop delivered from the cloud, rather than from an on-premises data center or a physical device like a laptop or workstation. But as I’ve said many times, the devil is in the details, because the approaches to cloud PCs vary widely. We believe that the best way to achieve the many benefits of cloud PCs is to implement them via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Amazon Workspaces was first to market with SaaS cloud PCs aimed mostly at SMB. Workspot entered the SaaS cloud PC picture next, with our Enterprise Desktop Cloud solution. And as most of you know, Microsoft just jumped into the space with their announcement of Windows 365 cloud PCs July 14th.

Each of these solutions has a different architecture, varied capabilities, and a range of options for IT leaders to consider. Today, after implementing our SaaS cloud PC solution for so many customers across Azure and Google Cloud, we’re in a solid position to share some thoughts about why moving to cloud PCs makes sense and what you should look for in a cloud PC solution.

Why Cloud PCs? (Or Why Software Will Eat the PC!)

Better Security: It’s almost impossible for IT teams to keep every physical PC and workstation in a distributed organization upgraded and patched. That means you’re vulnerable to a security breach, whether from inside or outside the organization.

Flexible Pricing Models: Moving to OpEx can have a positive impact on your budget, with a pay-as-you-go model. But cloud PCs also optimize resources, because depending on the usage profile, a flat rate price could make sense, or maybe hourly pricing works better, whereas a physical PC might sit idle 99% of the time – a waste of money! Either way, look for a cloud PC that gives you the flexibility to get the most out of your end-user computing (EUC) resources.

Unlimited Performance: Cloud PCs can solve the problem of latency that has plagued traditional VDI, so cloud PC users love the performance. Cloud PCs also get to take advantage of the latest technology; they never become obsolete and can be upgraded anytime.

Greater Business Agility: Every vendor talks about agility, but cloud PCs bring agility that is truly unprecedented, because they can be spun up or down in minutes, anywhere in the world, to accommodate business dynamics.

Comprehensive Observability: What if you could visualize performance and behavior patterns for every PC in your organization, across every office, home office, hotel, customer site… you get the picture! You could understand who is having connectivity issues and why; you could know if it’s just a handful of users, or an entire cloud region that’s affected; you could identify a possible ransomware attack and immediately take defensive measures. That’s not possible with physical PCs, or even with most virtual desktop solutions.

These are very compelling reasons to take the next step toward replacing physical PCs and on-premises VDI.

Cloud PC Choices

Once you’ve decided that SaaS cloud PCs are the way to go (as opposed to do-it-yourself solutions that only offer you a broker, forcing you to manage infrastructure and be responsible for the desktop SLA), you’ll want to take a deep dive into the capabilities each cloud PC solution architecture enables. IT leaders and solution architects will want to work together to make sure today’s and tomorrow’s requirements can be met. Here are some considerations:

Enterprises Need Flexibility

The cloud PC solution you select should be able to support the technology choices you’ve already made, including one or more public cloud providers, enterprise desktop security, management tools, identity management and multi-factor authentication. Organizations should not be forced into switching from the tools and processes they already have in place.

High-Performance is Non-Negotiable

If you have power users, such as engineers and designers, they’re going to push back on giving up their physical workstations until you can prove to them that you have something even better: A high-performance cloud workstation. A power user at one of our customers was strongly against adopting a Workspot cloud workstation until they actually tried it; now they love it because the performance is as good or better and it frees them from being tethered to a physical workstation. UAT is critical during your evaluation; end users must love the performance for you to be successful.

A Usage Model for Every Use Case 

Flexibility and choice extend to usage and pricing models too. One size does not fit all. Call centers, university computer labs, manufacturing floors, and other use cases benefit from the ability to share a PC among end users. Knowledge workers probably need a persistent cloud PC, whereas hospital staff only need a non-persistent cloud PC. Call center personnel only need access to a few apps. The solution you choose should offer all these choices to make sure each user has exactly the right resource.

Moreover, pricing models should be flexible too, based on the use case. For example, a flat rate price may not be appropriate for a cloud workstation that is only used occasionally, while an hourly cost model makes more sense.

Monitoring and Big Data Analysis

Here’s where it gets a little uncomfortable. While the benefits of the right cloud PC solution strongly justify adoption, IT teams must realize that the cloud computing environment is not within their control. The public cloud provider will make changes to the cloud computing environment whether you’re ready or not. Keeping on top of those changes and how they impact your EUC solution is tricky. However, if your cloud PC solution offers a sophisticated, big data collection, trending and correlation engine, that’s a start. What’s really important though is making all that data actionable.

A platform that collects millions of messages from endpoint devices, virtual machine agents, protocol gateways, enterprise connectors, and other control plane services is essential for the health of your implementation.  The data must be gathered from multiple clouds around the globe, and hundreds of networks in dozens of regional cloud data centers. Analyzing and correlating all this data should produce intelligence that helps you deliver a continuously secure and productive computing experience for all your end users.

If your organization has a large workforce that is distributed around the world, you likely need a cloud PC solution that offers you choices for multi-cloud support, identity management and MFA, management tools and more. There’s only one SaaS cloud PC solution that offers the flexibility and simplicity you need to modernize end user computing – that’s the Workspot difference!

Let us show you how it works! Schedule a demo and we can discuss your unique requirements.

The post What’s a Cloud PC and Why Do Enterprises Need Them? appeared first on Workspot.

Keeping control of the DevOps environment is really important. That’s one of the things I’ve learnt from working with a major software development house over the past few weeks.

The enterprise in question approached Workspot because they needed a platform that would allow them to push standardised desktops to individuals in their development teams, which are located in multiple sites all over the world.

Equally important is hiring great talent, but apparently, finding the right developers is a big challenge these days as there is a shortage of people with key skills. Theoretically, enterprises can hire talent in other geographical regions, but that presents a few challenges. Hiring people in another country will likely entail a lengthy visa process that can take several months to complete. Once the new hire process is complete, the onboarding process begins. Getting new hires settled in an office and procuring and shipping the laptops or workstations they need takes at least a couple more weeks before they can become productive. This organization (and many others I speak with) wants to be able to hire developers anywhere they can find the right people and then have them productive within hours, not weeks or months. Here’s where I come in, Workspot cloud desktops for DevOps at the ready to deliver Windows 10 desktops out to any of the 54 (and growing) Azure cloud regions around the globe.

What a Developer Needs: Cloud Desktops for DevOps

With cloud desktops and workstations, all the new, talented software developer needs is a device and an internet connection, and he or she instantly becomes part of the development team. This solved another headache that was consuming unnecessary IT resources at this software house. Before Workspot, they had to ship ‘standard’ machines to different states and countries, but this caused issues because there are differences in keyboard layout – not everyone uses the same one.  More importantly, sending a physical laptop, desktop or workstation could be surprisingly costly as import taxes are often added to the shipping cost. Those days are over. No more shipping, no more maintenance overhead, no more Windows v Mac debates. Now their developers are allowed to pick the device they want, reflecting what is most important to the nature of their work, and they simply buy it and expense it. Some are even using smartphones and tablets in docking stations, such as the Samsung DeX, instead of laptops. This is possible because the Windows 10 desktop they use for development is now a cloud desktop being delivered from Azure by Workspot!

Streamlined Dev/Test Process – Just Say Yes!

Workspot cloud desktops for DevOps teams supports multiple desktop images, so for developers, this means that they can have multiple desktops, all at differing versions, and all kept separate. This is great news if you don’t want to have to keep reimaging a physical device – and who wants to do that?  This also enables developers to try patching in isolation. Let’s say a release of some underlying software is issued; the developer could then allow that patch to be deployed in isolation. Then if it causes chaos, the developer can just delete that cloud desktop and spin up a new one using the original ‘gold’ image or template. No harm, no foul. Simple!

Of course, the developer might want to pass the desktop on to another person to see the issue and collaborate on next steps. This is easy with Workspot – you just reassign the cloud desktop to the person who needs to see it. This means the developer doesn’t have to create lengthy instructions about how to replicate the issue. They can just hand over the entire virtual machine.

Giving a developer a persistent desktop is one option; another option is the ability to give the developer a brand new, ‘clean’ cloud desktop each and every day since Workspot also delivers non- persistent desktops. So, each day when the developer accesses the cloud desktop, they have all the tools pre-installed as this desktop is built against a template.

Each and every day the developer would get exactly the same build. This does mean that any customisation would be lost, but customisation could be limited to the physical device they are using. So, on the physical device, whether that’s a laptop, a tablet, or whatever, the developer could have personal apps installed, such as music streaming services and social media apps, while keeping the Workspot cloud desktop isolated and dedicated only for work. This is how you get the best of both worlds! For this enterprise customer, it means they can control the developers’ IDE so code leaks from one release to the next don’t happen, intellectual property is better protected, and they have stronger overall data security.

Testers benefit as well as they know they’ll have a totally clean, brand new cloud desktop each day. This allows them to test and test again in splendid isolation knowing nothing was left behind from a previous test.

Workspot allows the Windows 10 desktop to be controlled, standardised and delivered exactly the same way over and over again. Since Workspot deploys exclusively on Azure, the underlying virtual machine type is controlled also and it’s identical each time. This comes in very handy if you want to insist that your developers develop on the same platform as the users will be on. Workspot hides all of the complexity associated with delivering virtual desktops as well as all the Azure complexity, making it easy for IT teams to deliver exactly the cloud desktop or workstation needed for each use case. IT leaders don’t have to worry about having Azure skills on the team; your IT admin doesn’t have to know what a Resource Group is or which Azure VM type to pick – that’s all handled by the Workspot turnkey service.

In-House Innovation

What I really enjoyed seeing was how this software house had integrated requests for spinning up a new cloud desktop into their ITSM solution – ServiceNow. Workspot publishes APIs which allowed the software house to produce an internal web portal where developers and testers can request that cloud desktops or workstations be provisioned for them. This creates a ServiceNow ticket which is routed to the appropriate manager (or skips this step if the requestor is already authorised to approve the request) so the manager can approve or deny the request. If approved, the cloud desktop is auto-created using the correct template and often before the approval email has been read by the requestor, their new cloud desktop is ready and waiting for them! For this customer, a brand-new Windows 10 client, with all the appropriate applications pre-installed, domain joined and delivered into any Azure region in the world, all happens in under 5 minutes. Here’s what the workflow looks like for their ITSM integration:

Spending time with this enterprise was a delight, because I was able to see first-hand the many benefits they are reaping from the Workspot solution. Their time-to-productivity is astonishing, and the user experience is outstanding, even for the most demanding GPU users. That’s Workspot cloud desktops for DevOps! Simply brilliant!

Ready to learn more? Workspot is an enterprise-customizable cloud VDI solution. Let’s explore your requirements. Schedule a demo now!

I regularly post on Twitter. Feel free to follow me at @JSamuelatWork

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Considerations for Enterprise-Readiness

BYOD, CYOD or COPE Devices

Management Your Way

Single Sign-On

Robust Security

API Integration

Modern Disaster Recovery

Cost Center Charge Back

Auditing & Event Logs

Monitoring & Analytics

Cloud PC SLA, Customer Success & Support Services

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