The Challenges with Legacy VDI

Permit me to paint an image: if you have spent any serious length of time with these on-premises solutions, you are already intimately familiar with these challenges. You can’t escape the swamp of outmoded technology in which you find yourself. The maintenance and upkeep of brokers, portals, licensing servers and databases is an ongoing source of frustration. Are you making the switch to a new system? Prepare yourself for a trying procedure that may take several months or maybe several years to complete. And increasingly, you cannot even hire the resources you need to do the work. All of this takes a serious mental and emotional toll.. Your users are unhappy. The daily norms include feelings of frustration, exhaustion, and a general sense of being overwhelmed. And let’s not even talk about the financial drain; it’s a bottomless pit.

The Beginning of a New Era: The On-Premises Capabilities of Workspot

What if, though, I told you that there is a way out of this quagmire? Is there any way to escape this repetitive and draining pattern? The on-premises capabilities offered by the Workspot Enterprise VDI Platform are more than just a step forward in technological development; today they are an absolute necessity for enterprises. This is why:

Imagine a future in which a cloud-native service replaces the complex deployment of brokers, portals, load balancers, gateways, databases, agents, etc. You are no longer responsible for updating or scaling the service. Imagine a future in which a single pane of glass replaces a complex web of management tools. With it you can deploy and operate virtual desktops and applications on either  your on-premises infrastructure or your favorite public cloud infrastructure. This is what we mean when we talk about operational simplicity. The unified approach provided by Workspot helps alleviate the complexity that has been plaguing your IT team, thereby providing a welcome influx of fresh air and a newly discovered sense of freedom.

The process of modernizing VDI is  not simply a change; rather, it is a transformation. A transition that will take you from the technological dark ages into a future that is so dazzling you will need to wear sunglasses! You’ll no longer be lagging behind the technological curve if you use Workspot; rather, you’ll be setting the pace.

What About Switching Costs?

You have multiple choices: (i) deploy Workspot for a new use case re-using your existing on-premises infrastructure for virtual desktops (ii) deploy Workspot for a new use case all in the cloud (iii) replace an existing legacy VDI implementation. With the infrastructure in place, you can conduct a pilot in a day, and you can take your first use case to production in about 45 days. That should be a most welcome surprise!

Moving to the on-premises capabilities of Workspot is not only a drastic upgrade in technology; it is also an emotional and operational emancipation. The days of dreading system updates and being terrified of the process of transitioning are behind us. Workspot makes the process easy, productive, and suited to your specific requirements at every step of the way.

The True Price: Workspot in Comparison to Legacy VDI

The statistics don’t lie. When you take into account not only the direct expenditures but also the indirect costs, such as downtime, missed productivity, and the emotional toll on your team, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for traditional VDI is exorbitant. The on-premises capabilities of Workspot provide a total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction that is not merely noteworthy; it is revolutionary. On average, Workspot’s customers have experienced a 50% reduction in software costs and 67% reduction in operational costs. Workspot’s SLA can reduce lost productivity by up to 80%, further enhancing your savings. You will now be able to allocate resources where they are most needed, which is in the areas of innovation and growth, because automatic scaling and the removal of labor-intensive upgrades have made this possible.

Successes in the Real World

Although the theoretical benefits are enticing, the success stories that have been achieved in the real world are the ultimate testament. Companies all around the world have finally been able to break free from the shackles of legacy VDI, and as a result, they are benefitting from operational efficiency and greater agility – as well as emotional relief – that they never dreamed was even possible.

How Can We Help You With Your Struggle to be Free?

The transition from the torturous world of legacy VDI to the freedom offered by the on-premises capabilities of Workspot is more than just a technology migration; it is a seismic shift in the capabilities of your business and in how you feel about the technology supporting it. Modernizing end-user computing this way is a significant step toward taking back control of your technology as well as improving your mental health!

Workspot’s on-premises capabilities offer a pathway to a future where VDI is not just about access but also about empowerment, agility, and the type of success that you can feel in your bones in a world where technology should be a driver of success and not a source of anguish.

Want to see Workspot in action? Schedule a demo so we can make you say “Wow!”

The post The Psychological and Organizational Cost of Legacy VDI and The Beginning of a New Era with Workspot’s On-Premises Capabilities appeared first on Workspot.

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

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

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

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

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

(3) Why should we choose Workspot?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Workspot Cloud Desktops?

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

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

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

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

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

C-Suite Conversations: How to Securely Enable Anywhere-Productivity?

Right now, every C-level leader is exploring options for supporting remote work effectively. If this recent Gartner survey is any indication, they are taking a long-term view of this transition. Gartner discovered that 74% of the CFOs surveyed stated they planned to transition at least part of their workforces to permanent remote working. It seems clear that beyond the immediate need to support remote work, organizations are taking a hard look at the costs associated with real estate and other costs that might be streamlined for greater efficiency. CIOs have an interest in divesting on-premises infrastructure too; many have cloud-first strategies that are returning attractive ROI already. A recent survey by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG),  found that “58% of organizations believe that Desktop as a Service (DaaS) could become the primary means of desktop consumption and delivery.” They also found that “current DaaS users have aggressive expansion plans.” Similarly, CISOs are asking tough questions about how their security posture changes with the shift to remote work – as they should. Virtual desktop solutions have always been known for improving security over the use of physical PCs, but are some virtual desktop solutions more secure than others? With these complicated requirements across leadership teams, what’s the best path forward?

Critical Considerations for Anywhere-Productivity Solutions

As you weigh solution options, there are a five essential requirements that surface repeatedly when we speak with IT leaders. Exploring what’s possible requires an understanding of each solution’s architecture. What are the limitations? Are they acceptable? Will your implementation be future-proof as technology evolves and your needs change?

Is the solution simple to deploy and manage?

There are a couple of factors to consider when it comes to simplicity. The first is time-to-value. How long does it take to deploy the solution? What in-house skill sets do you need on your IT team to get the job done? Can you be up and running in time to address your immediate needs for remote work? Secondly, there is the ongoing management of the solution. What’s the opportunity cost of allocating IT resources to manage the solution? It’s critical to think about the ongoing management and maintenance costs over both short and long term horizons.

Is the solution highly secure?

While your organization may have expanded VPNs and other remote access tools to get employees connected as quickly as possible, you and your security team should evaluate whether these are the most secure methods for longer term access. With so many organizations operating on a cloud-first strategy, confidence has grown considerably in the security of cloud computing. However, when considering virtual desktop solutions, it’s the details that matter, and security capabilities vary. We recommend that CISOs ask these tough questions of vendors to get to the bottom of the security capabilities of different virtual desktop solutions.

Does the solution support global scalability? In minutes?

If you have employees in more than one location, you should be able to spin up virtual desktops quickly to respond to dynamic business conditions while still ensuring great performance for your users. And now, more than ever, there will be necessary transitions between working in the office and working remotely. When we refer to global scalability, we’re talking about spinning up virtual desktops on-demand, in minutes, across geographies, and then managing them through a single pane of glass. You can read more here about why you should “think big” when it comes to virtual desktop scalability!

Is the solution cost effective?

Many virtual desktop solution have high up-front costs, including investments in infrastructure, licenses and consultants with special expertise to deploy the solution. It’s also important to consider the ongoing operating costs, and most legacy and cloud VDI solutions are still pretty complex. Complexity is expensive! We describe this problem is more detail in the blog: Flat-Rate Pricing is Key to Cloud PC Success

What about end user experience?

Here’s where I’ll use one of my favorite sound bites: Forget everything you know about VDI. That’s because VDI is notorious for poor performance. This means users will be less productive (and probably super cranky.) The good news is that the Workspot architecture – where cloud desktops can be placed in the cloud region closest to users –  has solved this problem. Workspot users can’t believe how great the performance is – even demanding users like graphic designers and CAD/BIM engineers. Getting good performance from VDI is an architecture discussion – dive deep on this one and keep users’ productivity high!

Which Approach is Best?

You have options for sure, and they all have different capabilities. Generally, there are three primary approaches to support remote work: Users VPN into the corporate data center or cloud app, use VDI, or leverage Desktop as a Service (DaaS). For brevity, I’ll point out the major deficiencies you should explore further.

VPNs

Security is one of the biggest issues with VPNs, since users can copy data to their endpoint. Additionally, VPNs are more vulnerable to cyberattacks than VDI or DaaS. With VPNs, IT still needs to manage endpoint logistics and security, and these channels are being overtaxed, resulting in poor performance. A VPN connection is a stop-gap measure, not a path to the future.

VDI

Well known challenges associated with VDI include high capital expenditures, management complexity, difficulty scaling and poor performance. Depending on the workload and the user’s proximity to the data center, it could be fine. But if you’re looking for agility and better security, look elsewhere.

DaaS

Not surprisingly, we believe that Desktop as a Service solutions are the direction in which you should be looking. With the right solution, IT simplicity, amazing performance for users, and more robust security than other approaches can be yours! DaaS comes in different flavors, so let’s explore your requirements and have an architecture conversation. It will become clear how Workspot is totally different, and why it’s the right choice to support remote work, anywhere-productivity, and business growth.

We developed a guideline that can help you evaluate various approaches to virtual desktops:
The GET Framework: How to Evaluate Virtual Desktop Solutions.

Download it now. 

The post Cloud PCs Are In, The Office Is Out. Here’s Your Guide to Enable Anywhere-Productivity. appeared first on Workspot.

Toss the Old VDI Baggage

So here we are. It’s time to put the baggage of legacy VDI behind us because there’s a much better way to go forward. It’s time to forget everything you know about VDI and take a fresh look at the new virtual desktops – cloud desktops – and what they bring to the table for enterprise growth. If we examine the concerns our customers consistently bring to us, whether they are new to VDI and have heard about problems experienced by their peers or they’ve implemented VDI and they’re considering a change from their current solution, the magnitude of the innovation Workspot has achieved will be clear.

• Complex to provision – Solved!
• Poor performance for users – Solved!
• Difficult to scale – Solved!
• Time-consuming and costly to operate – Solved!

Let’s discuss how Workspot is uniquely able to solve these customer pain points.

Rethink Virtual Desktops to Bring New Opportunities

Forget About Complex VDI Deployment. Get Fast Time-to-Value

It’s a combination of our technology innovation and our world-class Customer Success team that makes sure you achieve your deployment goals fast. We’ve taken large deployments live in a couple of weeks. It can take a bit longer for some customers depending on their readiness, but you get the picture. Time-to-value for legacy VDI is measured in months and years, not days and weeks. With Workspot, you don’t have to deal with infrastructure complexity; we do the heavy lifting for you.

Opportunities:

• Simplify IT processes
• Reallocate valuable IT resources to more strategic projects
• Launch cloud desktops anywhere in the world to pursue new business

Forget About Unproductive VDI Users. Get Outstanding Performance

The days of IT teams being the grievance committee are over. It’s time for them to be the heroes! Here’s how we can help. Legacy VDI produces a lot of unhappy end-users because latency and overprovisioning results in poor performance. Users wait around to login and to get access to their apps and data. Apps respond slowly if there is a long haul for that data to travel to a remote data center and back. It’s just the nature of legacy VDI. With Workspot, cloud desktops are placed in any of the 56+ Azure regions around the globe; you locate them nearest the user, usually within 25 – 50 ms, which is latency even powers users won’t notice. This is a complete game-changer for IT. Our customers tell us every day how much their users love Workspot because the performance is great and it just works – and that means fewer helpdesk tickets and happier users who can be equally productive at the office, at home, or anywhere.

Opportunities:

• Boost user productivity; retain valuable employees
• Attract Millennials with your forward-thinking IT stack
• Assign more strategic projects to your IT team

Forget About VDI Scalability Limitations. Get Workspot Cloud Desktops Anywhere in Minutes

The public cloud has brought us massive compute scale. Instead of having one or two data centers, today’s enterprises can have at least 56 around the world (and that’s just Azure!) This is where Workspot’s Cloud Desktop Fabric becomes truly transformational for enterprises. Imagine being able to scale up cloud desktops in minutes, anywhere, to meet new business demands. Imagine hiring all the best people for the job, no matter where they live. With Workspot, that kind of business transformation comes with the territory.

Opportunities

• Become the agile business that beats the competition to the punch
• Respond to market dynamics in real-time
• Quickly expand the business to new geographies

Forget About Crushing VDI OpEx. Get Flate-Rate Pricing & 99.95% Reliability

Anyone familiar with legacy VDI knows how labor-intensive it is to maintain and troubleshoot. It requires expensive IT people to wrangle all the complex piece-parts of the infrastructure and software components, and over time, those operating expenses continue to rise. Even so, when considering moving desktops to the cloud, CEOs and CIOs also worry about the variability of cloud compute costs, which can vary from region to region. Workspot not only reduces the overall TCO of virtual desktops, but we offer our cloud desktops with flat-rate pricing that includes the cost of Azure compute. You receive a single bill from Workspot for everything. Go-Live Deployment Services and ongoing support are also included. So not only did we re-invent the technology but we also completely changed the business model for virtual desktops to make it easier for IT teams to be successful. Plus, Workspot alleviates your IT team from worry about desktop reliability and all of the effort that goes into maintaining it. We take on the cloud desktop SLA, and our industry-leading 99.95% desktop uptime means you can worry about something else.

Opportunities

• Re-allocate highly skilled IT personnel to projects that drive business growth
• Assign less expensive, level 1 support people to respond to questions about their desktops
• Replace expensive physical workstations with low-cost endpoints

Ready to explore how cloud desktops can transform your business? Let’s schedule 30 minutes to discuss your use cases

The post Forget Everything You Know About Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) appeared first on Workspot.

But the “perfect personal computing method” does not sound nearly as good as the “Perfect PC” now does it?

It’s true that one company’s idea of perfect is often different than another’s – that’s why the Perfect PC must be flexible. It’s a foundational quality because there are so many uses cases and users with a variety of requirements. So back to the question at hand: What is the best way to provide end-users with access to the compute resources they need to be productive? How can enterprises balance this with the flexibility, security, and performance they need for business agility and risk management? How can centralization and automation make IT teams – and your enterprise – more productive? Let’s discuss your options.

A Few Options for the Perfect PC

You can corral Windows with management tools

There are many tools available, such as Microsoft SCCM, to help streamline the upkeep of thousands of enterprise PCs, but the reality is that even with these tools, how can you possibly stay on top of such a large number of endpoints distributed all over the world? You can’t. It’s too resource-intensive. And today the risk of a single unpatched PC is too great. Oh and there’s your hardware refresh cycle every 3-4 years. You can make it much easier on yourself – why not?!

You can centralize Windows with VDI

That’s what VDI is all about. Centralize everything in the data center and deliver Windows desktops and apps securely to any device, anywhere. This sounds great except for a few things, beginning with the “anywhere” part. The reality is that if you’re lucky enough to live in Sydney, but your company’s data center is in Dallas, when you try to get some work done your performance is going to suffer. Latency is a physics problem that’s not going away anytime soon. So, while many customers did gain some security benefits from VDI, there is a substantial cost: Productivity. Add up slow performance, unhappy users, difficulty scaling and ever-increasing OpEx to deal with all the complexity, and what do you have? A compelling opportunity to rethink your IT strategy.

You can get rid of Windows and switch to Chromebooks

Chromebooks and Android devices are the popular crowd these days, especially with Millenials. This generation and those following it are always-on; they are accustomed to being connected to modern web apps, using a variety of portable devices, and everything just works. With greater than 70% market share in schools, it’s likely that much of their tech education happened on a Chromebook. There’s little doubt that Chromebooks and Android will continue to play an important role as these tech influencers fill the job market.

Enterprise Requirements for the Perfect PC

What’s cool about the Perfect PC is that it’s not an end game; it’s a journey with an ever-evolving landscape. It’s based on Workspot’s Cloud Desktop Fabric architecture, which provides the flexibility and scalability you’ll need to keep up with technology shifts and changing business demands.  So what would the Perfect PC accomplish? As we’ve said, enterprises’ definition of “perfect” will vary, but what they need to achieve with the Perfect PC has common threads. Our enterprise customers tell us there are 4 key requirements at the top of their lists:

The Perfect PC must improve my security posture

There’s a lot of talk in information security circles about the Zero Trust Security model. This is a perspective that assumes every request for access to your corporate information assets  – devices, networks, applications, etc. – is a breach.  The bottom line is “never trust, always verify.” The principle of least privileged access is essential to the model, which allows users access to precisely what they need, and nothing more, on a just-in-time basis, to conduct their work. CISOs and IT leaders are constantly looking for ways to contribute to their Zero Trust posture. Workspot augments enterprise security via our cloud-native architecture all the way through to the Workspot Client that resides on users’ devices. A crucial design decision that enables us to participate in Zero Trust Security models is our control plane and data plane separation. No other vendor has done this. It means that cloud desktop provisioning and management controls are completely separate from your data. Your data never enters Workspot Control. We can’t see it. This is not the case with other vendors’ solutions. Zero Trust means that you don’t trust anyone, not even the vendor of your cloud desktop service. Our advice? Ask vendors really hard security questions. And for end-user computing that enhances your security posture? Workspot. Check.

The Perfect PC should deliver outstanding performance

People may talk about protocols and which one is better/faster, but that’s an old conversation. When it comes to performance, the real issue, as we’ve pointed out, is latency. People using a legacy virtual desktop when they are located far away from the data center are going to have poor performance. Throw any protocol in the mix and the latency is still a problem. So to deliver performance that makes your users happy (even CAD engineers!), you solve the latency problem by placing Workspot cloud desktops in the cloud region closest to your users, which is typically less than 50ms away. They won’t even notice they are remote. Outstanding performance that is often even better than a physical desktop or workstation? Workspot. Check.

The Perfect PC must simplify IT for my organization (aren’t you tired of empty “simplicity” promises!?)

Everyone knows that the effort involved in managing hundreds or thousands of physical endpoints is time-consuming and fraught with risk; how can you possibly make sure every endpoint people use for work is secure? There’s nothing simple about managing this many physical devices, even with best of breed management tools. With on-premises VDI, the complexity (and associated OpEx costs) are well-known. But those same vendors who promised that VDI would simplify IT are now making the same simplicity promise with the cloud-hosted versions of their products – and they describe this as “turnkey” too. Wait, what? Putting an outdated VDI architecture in the cloud doesn’t simplify anything. And there’s nothing turnkey about it, at least not by our definition.

Here is what massive IT simplification looks like: Workspot helps move your Windows 10 desktop workloads to the public cloud and we take the SLA off your hands. You provision and manage your cloud desktops, all over the world, through a single web console. Spin up new desktops in minutes when you need them, and you never spend time managing infrastructure or parsing cloud desktop bills (just enjoy the flat-rate pricing!). Your cloud desktop service is always up to date and continually adding cool, new features. You can even have standby cloud desktops that IT can activate with one click during a business continuity event. Let’s face it –  you and your team have better things to do than micromanage a bunch of infrastructure. For true simplicity? Workspot. Check.

The Perfect PC must be customizable

Some vendors take a rudimentary approach to cloud desktops. That is to say, the cloud desktop is one-size-fits-all, which can work for small companies. In contrast, Workspot’s turnkey cloud desktop and workstation service was built for simplicity, while meeting enterprise requirements. You shouldn’t have to change the management tools you use or settle for a vanilla, server-based Windows 10 “experience” instead of a real Windows 10 desktop. You should be able to customize your cloud desktops with your Windows 10 corporate image and apply your existing security policies and MFA (such as Azure Active Directory or Okta), and you shouldn’t have to train your staff to use IT processes that someone else, who does not understand your company, dreamed up. Workspot is the only turnkey, cloud desktop service with customizable everything, ready to meet the unique needs of enterprises. Check.

How to Build  the Perfect PC

There are 4 components to the Perfect PC, and you can mix and match to get what you need for every use case you need to address because as we know, one size does not fit all!

1. A low-cost endpoint: Microsoft Surface Go, Chromebook, and Android phones are popular with our customers. Have power users? You can easily connect these devices to a keyboard and multiple monitors when you need large-screen productivity.
2. A wireless network: Today it’s WLAN or 4G, soon you’ll have 5G.
3. A high-performance Windows 10 cloud desktop that’s 50ms or less away from each user – Workspot!
4. An elastic, global public cloud: Today Workspot works closely with Microsoft, and we deploy cloud desktops and GPU workstations across 56+ Azure regions.

If you’re ready to explore the possibilities for your organization, let’s talk. We’ll schedule some time with one of our product experts who can show you how it works!

The post The Best Way to Manage Microsoft Windows? The Perfect “PC.” appeared first on Workspot.

There’s no doubt that technology has improved both our personal and professional productivity.  In a recent survey by ESG research, 83% of respondents agreed. Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst at ESG, recently published a report entitled “Top Ten Accelerants of Cloud-hosted desktops in 2020,” in which he describes the opportunities that come with adopting cloud desktops. Each of the 10 “accelerants” Mark describes can be bucketed into the primary themes we hear from our customers. Essentially, we could not agree more with Mark’s conclusions, because they reflect exactly what our customers are telling us.

Simplify IT

IT teams only have so much time and energy to go around, so their efforts need to be directed in a way that is of strategic value to the business. Conducting a PC refresh every few years, and keeping the lights on in an on-premises data center pretty much don’t qualify as strategic contributions. That’s not just our opinion. It’s examples like these, where there is a much more efficient path, that is driving the cloud-first initiatives that are so commonplace today. If someone else can do the job better, faster and cheaper, you should probably make that change, right? Similarly, micro-managing legacy VDI or the cloud-hosted version of VDI, where you still have to deal with infrastructure, upgrades, and SLAs, is pretty archaic at this point. To achieve true IT simplification, you’ll need to look for a cloud desktop solution that does the heavy lifting for you. That’s where Workspot’s turnkey cloud desktop SaaS solution comes in. There’s nothing else like it. Take a closer look to see why 2020 should the year of the cloud desktop for your organization  Here’s one customer’s story where IT simplicity was top of mind.

Righting the Wrongs of Legacy VDI

It’s an old refrain, but a powerful change catalyst nonetheless: Legacy VDI is causing problems for many customers. It’s expensive, it’s complex to manage, and end-users often experience poor performance, which impacts productivity.  In the ESG report, Mark notes that while VDI has worked in certain use cases for a  limited number of users, the difficulty arises when it’s time to scale the deployment. We believe that perpetuating that complexity and poor user experience makes zero sense because the right cloud desktop solution solves those problems. With Workspot, even the most demanding users, such as CAD engineers, discover that their Workspot cloud workstations perform as well or better than their local, physical workstation – and it frees them to work from anywhere. This customer recently made the switch from legacy VDI to cloud desktops. A key decision-maker on the IT team had years of experience with both on-prem and hosted virtual desktop solutions, and once they saw what was possible with Workspot, there was no question that cloud desktops were the way to go to meet their performance and flexibility needs.

Trust No One; Plan for the Worst

It sounds fatalistic, but in the words of former Intel CEO Andy Grove, “only the paranoid survive.” Zero Trust security and effective disaster recovery are top-of-mind for CIOs because the consequences of a breach or extended downtime due to a disaster can literally result in the business shutting down, or irreparable damage to brand reputation. In the ESG report, Mark discusses how cloud desktops deliver greater security by keeping data off endpoints and by taking advantage of broad and deep threat intelligence offered by the public cloud providers. Truly, there are few in-house IT teams that can accomplish this level of security. However, we need to take the security conversation further. There is only one cloud desktop solution in the Universe that is uniquely architected for Zero Trust Security, and that’s Workspot.  This is an absolutely critical conversation to have with any cloud desktop vendor you are considering. We made an architecture decision to separate the control and data planes. This means that the management elements of the cloud desktop solution are completely separate from your data. This is really important to understand: If the control and data planes are not separate, then your data and authentication systems traverse the same system. Your data is potentially co-mingled with other customers’ data, and when it passes through the control plane, the cloud desktop vendor can access it!  And that means you cannot achieve Zero Trust Security. We talked about this in more depth in our blog, “Top 3 Cloud Desktop Security Questions for CISOs.” Read the blog for additional details, but the bottom line is: For security (and performance and scalability too!), you need a cloud desktop solution that separates the control and data planes. There’s only one: Workspot. And to enhance your business continuity plan, cloud desktops come with built-in DR, because when there’s a business disruption, people can access their cloud desktop from anywhere. Once they are safe, getting people back to productivity is paramount.

Business Agility is the Foundation for Growth

The term “business agility” is sprinkled about everywhere. It goes on my list of overused tech industry words, for sure. But that doesn’t make it any less important when defined precisely. In Mark Bowker’s report, he writes about two very key components of agility: the ability to spin up cloud desktops on-demand, and the ability to support temporary /seasonal workers by being able to easily turn on or turn off access to business resources. In addition to those things, our customers find new avenues for growth beyond previous geographical boundaries, because they can hire people anywhere in the world and give them a cloud desktop in minutes. Each of these abilities contributes to business growth. Not every cloud desktop solution provides this level of flexibility, but – you guessed it – Workspot does! This $1B MEP firm is going “all-in” on Workspot Workstation Cloud because it provides the performance and business agility the firm requires to accelerate growth.

We hope the report from ESG is helpful as you consider the alternatives to physical PC and legacy VDI complexity.  When you’re ready, schedule a demo with us and bring your toughest questions. We look forward to discussing your unique requirements and helping make 2020 the year of the cloud desktop and the year of accelerated growth for your organization!

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Achieving operational excellence

When I joined Workspot, I never imagined the amazing conversations I’m having with CIOs and COOs in companies of all sizes. There is a “perfect storm” of conditions that is aligning IT and business strategy within these companies, fueled by the business agility that Workspot offers. When you get down to it, the challenges we discuss are similar, whether the exec I’m speaking with is from a Fortune 500 company or a growing ENR 100 Design/Build firm. They are all focused on serving their customers better and growing the business.

When it comes to business growth, operational efficiency is an important variable and one that requires mindshare from all key organizational stakeholders. For IT, excellence requires two key qualities: A forward-thinking philosophy that drives constant evaluation of new technologies and a bias for questioning everything.  The goal for IT, as a contributor to business growth, is to continually look for opportunities to apply technology that improves execution and resource utilization.

At Workspot, we are partnering closely with our customers to achieve operational excellence.  We’re excited by the new levels of business agility that enables our customers to respond rapidly to evolving business dynamics. Here are  the top 3 ways our customers are achieving operational excellence today:

Replace legacy VDI, physical desktops with cloud desktops in Azure

Maintaining data center infrastructure, legacy VDI and physical desktops consumes significant IT resources. As a result, virtually every organization I speak with is re-evaluating these investments and looking for opportunities to use public cloud infrastructure and cloud desktops to streamline operations. The CIOs I speak with want to “get out of the data center business” so IT personnel can delegate the mundane job of “keeping the lights on” to someone else. When Workspot takes over responsibility for the cloud desktop SLA, it liberates the in-house IT team from the micro-management and upkeep of IT infrastructure, thereby dramatically simplifying the procure/provision/maintain process and freeing those resources for other higher value-add projects.

Automate IT workflows

Provisioning a new physical PC or GPU workstation for an employee can take days or weeks. With Workspot’s cloud desktops, the process of adds/moves/changes can be automated, and people can get productive in minutes, saving IT countless cycles and significant cost, while also accelerating time-to-productivity for users. IT can also automate a direct charge to each cost center, and include detailed usage reports by user, either directly or through integration with your existing IT services and operations management tools, such as ServiceNow and BMC Remedy. Cloud desktops offer numerous opportunities to re-allocate precious IT resources, simplify IT processes and reduce costs.

Hire talent anywhere without opening a branch office

Top tier talent is key to achieving operational excellence and ensuring that customers receive high-quality outcomes. The right cloud desktop solution is available globally, so your organization can a) hire the best people regardless of where they live or choose to work from and b) pursue new business anywhere – without having to incur the hefty cost of building and maintaining a branch office. Workspot has enabled organizations to hire the best talent anywhere through rapid on-boarding, auto-provisioning high-performance cloud desktops in minutes, and then enabling IT to manage it all through a single web-based interface.

In summary, gone are the days when IT departments were simply a cost center. With Workspot, IT can streamline operations and increase overall productivity, thus becoming an active contributor to business growth and efficiency with large positive impacts on the firm’s bottom line.

Find out how Workspot can help you achieve new levels of agility and respond to change and new opportunities faster. Schedule a demo to get started!

The post Why CIOs & COOs are Partnering to Achieve Excellence with Cloud-Edge Desktops appeared first on Workspot.

The post Why Every Business Needs a PC in the Cloud Solution appeared first on Workspot.

This defines the culture at Workspot and how we work together to make sure our customers are successful with our solutions, but we take it a step further. We say, “There’s no I in Workspot”, and that means that when you work with us to deploy virtual desktops, you’ll never have to “bring your own Infrastructure” (BYOI). We provide your organization “PCs in the Cloud”! Simply decide how many you need and in which of the 54 Azure regions they should live, and we do the rest. With legacy VDI choices, whether cobbled together on-prem or in the cloud, you will always find yourself mired in the complexity and cost of setting up and maintaining infrastructure (servers, networks, storage, databases, etc.). As you rethink virtual desktop solutions, it’s vitally important to understand the difference between turnkey, “born in the cloud”, complete desktop solutions and those that are merely “cloud-enabled” BYOI projects.

These days all kinds of software companies have jumped on the cloud bandwagon – and it’s easy to see why. All you have to do is take a look at some of the surveys by industry analysts to see the huge numbers of organizations that already have a cloud presence or are quickly moving in that direction. Everyday I speak with CIOs and other IT execs who tell me that investing in new data center infrastructure going forward will only be on an exception basis. Many, if not most, see no strategic value to maintaining data center infrastructure, and they are eager to shed the resource overhead required to deal with all that complexity. If you haven’t already, read our blog, “Your Datacenter is Dead, Long Live Azure” for more on this trend. In this day and age of the hyperscale cloud providers underpinning big data, AI and machine learning, IT people and their budgets can be applied to way more valuable analytics projects that can drive new product development, contribute to corporate growth, create competitive advantage, and change lives. So if you can achieve all that, why waste your resources on “keeping the lights on” IT tasks, such as managing data center infrastructure? Why allocate those precious IT resources to micro-manage virtual desktop infrastructure? When you think of it this way, the waste of time and talent really becomes clear. Managing infrastructure just doesn’t make sense anymore. As you take steps to get out of the infrastructure business, you need to drill down on the cloud solutions vendors offer to really understand what your IT team will (and won’t) be responsible for managing.

Born in the Cloud Means Simplicity and More

You see the term “Born in the Cloud” referenced here and there, and we use it to describe Workspot. What do we mean by it, and why does it matter? Techopedia defines it as “a specific type of cloud service that does not involve legacy systems, but was designed for cloud delivery.” Techopedia also notes that born in the cloud products deliver certain benefits, such as “rapid elasticity” and “on-demand availability”. Modern VDI solutions were built from the ground up as cloud services, and there’s only two: Workspot and Amazon Workspaces. Workspot’s enterprise customers require desktop provisioning that happens in minutes, instant scalability, and better-than-physical-PC performance. Those requirements can only be met with a “born in the cloud” solution like Workspot. Those are some pretty compelling benefits, right? But you also get simplicity. If your virtual desktop solution doesn’t simplify your world, it’s time to re-evaluate. These born in the cloud or “cloud-native” virtual desktop and GPU workstation benefits are available to you today, and you should demand them.

Is it Cloud-Enabled or Cloud-Native?

Here are some more terms you need to drill into. When it comes to virtual desktops, the difference between “cloud-enabled” and “cloud-native”- terms that are sometimes used interchangeably and can be easily confused – is VAST. Here is the heart of the matter: A cloud-enabled VDI solution is a legacy product that was originally designed for a traditional data center and was then plunked into the cloud. A cloud-native virtual desktop solution is built from the ground up using micro-services, is multi-tenant, and features fast and easy scalability; it was “born in the cloud”. Cloud-enabled VDI carries with it all the same baggage it had in its data center incarnation: It’s complex, single tenant, and hard to scale. They provide the VDI control plane, although you still have to BYOI, so you’re still allocating those precious IT resources to infrastructure management. The cloud-native solutions deliver all the simplicity, elasticity and scalability benefits I mentioned above. As you shed your ties to IT infrastructure, you have two great choices depending on your specific needs: Workspot and Amazon Workspaces. All the other vendors have cloud-enabled solutions that force you to stay in the infrastructure business, and that will pretty much ruin your life. Here’s why.

Why BYOI Will Ruin Your Life

With any vendor solution other than Amazon Workspaces or Workspot, you’ll need to BYOI. If you’re running your virtual desktops in on-premises infrastructure, it’s all on you to maintain and micromanage your virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The challenges with on-prem VDI solutions are widely known; they are complex, costly, and difficult to scale. So you’ll have smart, expensive IT people managing and troubleshooting a whole-bunch-o-infrastructure full-time rather than using their time to help drive product innovation, save lives, and change the world. Hmmmm. Similarly, if you choose a cloud-enabled VDI solution, you guessed it, you’ll still be in the infrastructure business: you have to BYOI, and you’ll still incur the opportunity cost of all those smart people doing unnecessary work. That’s what a cloud-enabled product buys you; the opportunity to plunk down more infrastructure (whether on-prem or in the cloud), that you have to manage and troubleshoot. It’s just as complex to deal with as if you had your virtual desktops on-prem. Without a cloud-native solution, you will miss out on the simplicity benefits.

Lose the “I” in VDI for Business and Personal Transformation

There are good reasons for organizations of all sizes to get out of the business of managing virtual desktop infrastructure. Reallocation of IT resources to more strategic projects, better security, support for mobile work styles, greater agility to serve new markets and as good or better performance than PCs and workstations are just a few reasons why it’s time to go all-cloud. Our customers say it best, “We do not want to be an infrastructure provider; it adds no value”; “Infrastructure has no strategic value for us as a company”; and “We cannot afford the downtime that comes from VDI complexity.” The business benefits of reducing or eliminating IT infrastructure, combined with the opportunity for IT personnel to gain new cloud skill sets and become more strategic players in the organization make for a compelling case for adopting born in the cloud, cloud-native, virtual cloud desktops and workstations.

Find out more about how it works! Schedule a live demo with one of our product experts.

The post There’s No “I” in Workspot (or How VDI Infrastructure is Ruining Your Life) appeared first on Workspot.

Focusing on the public cloud for your primary IT infrastructure is a wise move. IT teams that continue to make on-prem data center investments today will have some explaining to do as cloud migration accelerates. In a recent report, Gartner Research Director Tiny Haynes stated, “By 2025, 80% of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data center, versus 10% today.”¹ That’s an impressive number, and it’s just a short 7 years away! Based on our experience talking with IT leaders every day, we agree with Gartner. What does this mean for your organization, and what do you need to do to prepare?

Cloud Computing is Strategic

Just this week a new customer we’re working with told us that their on-premises data center infrastructure “has no strategic value for the company.” They, like so many organizations, have quickly evolved to a place where moving to the cloud is enabling the flexibility, compute power and business agility they need to achieve their corporate growth goals. The cost and complexity of managing and maintaining a data center no longer make any sense for them. It’s not just about the maintenance overhead of on-prem infrastructure though, among the many compelling reasons for cloud computing is the ability to hire talent anywhere in the world and pursue new business regardless of geography. This opens up revenue opportunities that were just not addressable because of the computing limitations organizations face with on-premises data center infrastructure. Additionally, CIOs are looking ahead to how technologies enabled by the cloud, such as AI and machine learning, can revolutionize their industries. This is particularly true in healthcare and life sciences, where cloud computing allows for unprecedented data analytics that will quite literally save lives. You’re just not going to get there with an on-prem data center.

If you’ve gotten to know Workspot a bit you know that we were founded by VDI pioneers. And the whole purpose of starting the company was to combat the cost and complexity of the “I” in VDI: Infrastructure! Our solution to the legacy VDI problem is our innovative, cloud-native control plane for deploying and managing virtual desktops and workstations. Combine this with the awesome compute power of Microsoft Azure, and you really can just walk away from the “I”, and in most cases, you probably should. So, now that the death of your data center is imminent, there’s really no reason to look back. The reality is that when you lose your on-prem data center, you gain 50 data centers around the world with Azure!

Now you have 50+ Azure data centers at your fingertips!

 Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

While the vast majority of CIOs we speak with want to get out of the business of running a data center, there are those who remain hesitant, either because of investments they’ve already made, or they face regulatory requirements that complicate moving workloads and data to the cloud. It’s certainly not trivial to make the move, but there are solutions, such as Workspot Desktop Cloud and Workstation Cloud, that make things a whole lot easier. If you need to keep some desktops and data on-prem, or if you need to take an incremental approach to your cloud move, we have the best solution to accommodate that. From a simplicity, enterprise readiness, security, and performance standpoint, there is no better solution for deploying your Windows 10 desktops and GPU workstations than Workspot. With 50+ Azure data centers at your disposal, chances are your users will be 25ms or less from their desktops, and that means they’re going to have great performance, and in some cases, users will see “10-12 ms response times” which our customers have reported with Workstation Cloud. That’s  better-than-physical-workstation performance!

Repurposing IT Resources – What a Gift!

As your data center infrastructure becomes less strategic to the business, your IT team becomes more strategic. That’s because cloud computing frees these smart, highly valuable resources from “keeping the lights on” (KTLO) tasks associated with managing infrastructure. Sure, some of them will need to acquire some new skills to navigate your new cloud infrastructure focus, whether those are coding skills, big data experience or soft skills that will help translate technology options and decisions to the C-suite. Supporting that transition is just a no-brainer when you consider that end user computing in your organization is now simple, secure and future-proof.

Get Started with Virtual Windows 10 Desktops

Moving to the cloud is a multifaceted journey.  When you’re ready to move your physical desktops and workstations to the cloud or transition away from complicated, on-prem, legacy VDI, you should definitely put Workspot on your list. You’ve already made the bold decision to move away from the data center business, so make sure you select the right virtual desktop solution for your organization. It’s important to understand the advantages of a cloud-native solution versus one that is merely cloud-enabled (PS: There’s only two: Workspot and Amazon Workspaces!)

When you’re ready, we’re ready to help! Schedule a 15-minute demo at your convenience and we’ll show you how it works and why our customers are so happy!

¹ Gartner, Prepare for the Death of the Datacenter as We Know It, Tiny Haynes, Research Director, 22 May 2018

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