Adaptive enterprises are built, not bought. It is a transformational process. Every enterprise arrives at the task of transforming itself with a different history, differing goals and priorities, and different transformational needs. Accordingly, every enterprise has a unique path with a unique set of steps. The journey to the “Cloud PC-Enabled Adaptive Enterprise” begins with a thorough understanding of what your enterprise looks like today.

Here are some key questions to ask yourself about your business:

• What are your critical business priorities and strategies?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of your people, processes, and technologies?
• Where in the organization are you more-or-less agile today – and where do you want to be as a result of transformation?
• Where is your technology budget currently spent? What percentage goes to maintaining the legacy desktop virtualization and application delivery solution and its related infrastructure? What percentage is innovation?
• How does the business view the technology group, and why? Are they viewed as a strategic business partner?

These questions and others should be asked within the context of an assessment process, and the answers will help you develop an important foundational understanding of the state of your enterprise. You can’t build a house without a solid foundation. The same principle applies to the Cloud PC-Enabled Adaptive Enterprise.

Three Dimensions of Agility

This assessment should consider three distinct dimensions of agility. These are critical not only for the larger enterprise, but also for understanding how to leverage the capabilities that Cloud PCs can potentially deliver to the organization within these dimensions.

The dimensions are:

• Time – this dimension considers the speed at which your organization can promote, enable, and react to change. How quickly can you make the necessary changes that are triggered by your business decisions? How well can your organization keep pace with the rate of change in your industry?
• Range – this dimension considers how you implement change across your business, whether across processes, organizations, or technologies. Do you have to limit the initial implementation of those changes to a certain geography, and then roll them out across the enterprise? Can you do it worldwide from the start?
• Ease – this dimension considers the level of effort and cost required to introduce or support change. How effectively are you taking advantage of the enablers of change that are arising in the marketplace? You may have been able to merge all your corporate directories to streamline processes, but if you had to rely extensively on expensive contractors and have exhausted your own personnel in the process, the effort was far from easy, even though you were able to accomplish it.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into these dimensions and how they apply to the Cloud-PC-Enabled Adaptive Enterprise.

Dimension 1: Time

We live and work in a world of change. To thrive in that world, we must be able to embrace change quickly, thoroughly, and efficiently. At the heart of a Cloud PC-Enabled Adaptive Enterprise is the understanding that the business and the technology group must be synchronized—that is, they must become aligned and stay aligned—for the enterprise to capitalize on change. A business decision—whether for a new product or service, more rapid introduction of new products, adoption of a new product or service delivery modality, or any other decision—triggers a series of technology changes. The challenge is to ensure that those technology events occur as quickly as the business decision-makers need them to occur—and that is where most organizations fall short.

With a multi-cloud-oriented architecture that allows our customers to deliver Cloud PCs from any cloud (e.g., Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS), Workspot delivers on the challenge of providing compute resources as fast as possible, sometimes within minutes! How? We have created a completely new architecture from the ground-up that is required. Older architectures require the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)  stack to be copied to every cloud region, and installing and operating 50+ copies of a complex stack is not possible. A cloud-native, globally distributed architecture that allows horizontal scalability across cloud regions in minutes is required. This new architecture, invented by Workspot, is the foundation for how technology groups deliver the right resources to the right people, when and where they need them.

Dimension 2: Range

Above, we described range as how you implement change across your business, whether across processes, organizations, or technologies. Many organizations we encounter are still taking a “single cloud – single region” approach when deploying a Cloud PC solution. Which is absolutely OK, but what about the “black swan” event-driven changes that happen? These events, which are difficult to predict, are often random and unexpected, and greatly impact the normal course of business. They are considered outlier events, because there is no past data that can predict their occurrence in the foreseeable future. Therefore, the ability to implement a solution across the business that is global in scope would be difficult with legacy virtual desktop solutions.

With Workspot’s Control Plane, global scope, and multi-cloud capability, our customers can deliver Cloud PCs and cloud workstations to users worldwide, in a matter of minutes:

Dimension 3: Ease

As we mentioned, ease means “the amount of work and funds needed to bring about or support a change.” Here is where the turnkey approach and a close strategic partnership with Workspot makes the journey to delivering cloud PCs and cloud workstations almost weightless, drastically reducing the workload of the technology group staff. Today, the majority of legacy desktop virtualization deployments were built via the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach. With this DIY approach, the technology group is responsible for everything in blue, and the vendor provides the yellow boxes:

With the turnkey approach, Workspot relieves your burden and headaches by providing everything in the orange boxes:

Unlike other solutions, with Workspot there is no need to rely on expensive contractors and exhausting your own personnel in the process of moving your desktop workload to the cloud. Workspot is with you as your trusted partner from the get-go; we don’t just instruct you download a manual and walk away.

As part of the ease of Workspot, our objective is for you to realize the value of your purchase as soon as possible, while also preparing your team to manage the solution and scale as needed. Included with your Workspot subscription is up to 90 days of Go Live Deployment Services. These services, conducted by our Customer Success experts, deliver the fastest time-to-value in the industry and ensure your overall deployment success. We work alongside your team to take cloud PCs live for your first set of users. This initial deployment can take as little as a day, and usually involves a subset of users whose user acceptance testing and overall satisfaction will prove the value of your Workspot investment. Custom Deployment Services are also available that go beyond the scope of the initial Go Live Deployment Services if you ever need them.

There are eight elements to Go-Live Deployment Services:

1. Dedicated Workspot experts, including a Customer Success Project Manager and a Customer Success Architect, who are assigned to your project. Together with your designated team members, they identify desired business outcomes, establish project milestones, and guide your cloud PC implementation to success.
2. Project kickoff, where the implementation team defines the requirements for your first use case, and establishes a timeline for the 90-day Go Live Services phase, in accordance with your implementation success criteria.
3. Customer onboarding includes creating your account for the Workspot Control tenant and a series of training sessions on Workspot Control, the web-based admin console used by your IT team to manage your implementation globally. Training sessions are recorded and accessible to you at any time.
4. Deployment configuration, where we work side-by-side with your team to configure your Cloud PC environment, and establish connectivity between the Workspot Enterprise Desktop Cloud service and your production IT environment.
5. Template validation, where the Workspot Customer Success implementation team helps you decide if you’ll use an existing corporate image or build a cloud-optimized marketplace image.
6. Implementing your Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Identity Provider (IdP) integration. We understand that securing your Cloud PC environment is everything, so we work with you to implement and validate your authentication and authorization methods.
7. End-user testing. We believe user satisfaction is the ultimate test of success, and user acceptance testing (UAT) is an important part of the deployment process. During UAT, our Customer Success team helps you optimize your environment to achieve peak performance for your end-users.
8. Documentation and training. As stated above, we don’t just leave you with a manual and say goodbye. We provide you with the platform documentation to help your technology group when they are ready to take over the production environment. In addition, we recommend taking advantage of the two-day training course included with your Workspot subscription.

To complete the ease definition, enterprises today should expect seamless access to cloud desktops from anywhere, at any time, through any device – as well as outstanding performance, without giving a moment’s thought to if or how it will work. This is utility computing, and there is no reason to settle for anything less. Technology teams can expect rapid Cloud PC provisioning, seamless template updates, and accelerated expansion to new use cases across multiple cloud platforms and regions worldwide.

Workspot’s highly sophisticated instrumentation, root cause analysis, and blast radius analysis identify problems proactively and in real-time, so they can be resolved as quickly as possible. Instead of needing to know how it all functions, admins can be confident that they have a proven, enterprise-ready, cloud desktop delivery solution that simply works. More than just a high-performance desktop deployment architecture, Workspot Control takes cloud desktops to a new level. Desktop virtualization has been transformed into a global, elastic utility for end-user computing.

In Summary

A Cloud PC-Enabled Adaptive Enterprise epitomizes the enterprise designed to succeed in a changing world—to innovate in response to or in anticipation of change. In essence, being an adaptive enterprise is about timely and affordable technology group support for business innovation. Becoming more adaptive helps you achieve greater simplicity, agility, and value across your business, and enables your entire organization—not just your technology group—to be more efficient and effective. Imagine adding partners to your supply chain securely in minutes instead of days or months; doubling the pace of new product introductions without sacrificing quality; or shifting your investment dollars from infrastructure maintenance to innovation. These are the types of significant gains achieved by a Cloud PC-Enabled Adaptive Enterprise.

Becoming a Cloud PC-Enabled Adaptive Enterprise helps you address core business needs—to maximize return, mitigate risk, improve performance, and increase agility. By working together to create an environment in which you can truly synchronize the business and the technology group, we create an enterprise that can adapt to change, create new opportunities, and capitalize upon rapidly changing market conditions—all of which puts you in a singularly powerful position to deliver value, compete, and win in a rapidly changing world.

The post Getting Started: The Journey to a Cloud PC-Enabled Adaptive Enterprise appeared first on Workspot.

As CIOs develop strategies to immediately capitalize on necessary and strategic changes to increase their company’s competitiveness, reduce costs, and better serve their customers, they must navigate both internal and external factors. All this while developing an IT environment and business processes that can readily support not only future changes, but the worldwide changes happening right now.

What Main Factors Impact the Ability the Change?

We find ourselves still dealing with a worldwide pandemic that continues to rage as new variants emerge, which has a continuous impact and threatens the global supply chain and other critical functions and industries. The U.S. and the world economy are teetering on the edge of a downturn/recession, and businesses need to find a way to keep the lights on and continue to grow and be successful.

With IT budgets under this impending threat, CIOs will have even greater difficulty dealing with constant change, but now is not the time to cut back. In conversations with executives recently, I often stated that retrenchment may give you time – but not opportunity, progress, or a future. Change brings new opportunities. The ability to adapt to that change is a significant competitive advantage. However, because change is sometimes disruptive and costly, few businesses are prepared to regularly capitalize on these kinds of change-driven opportunities.

Can You Become the Future Enterprise… Today?

The answer is YES! I’ve been finding a lot lately that corporations only look at what’s happening in their environments, rather than taking a step back and obtaining a fresh perspective. Let’s face it, most businesses in the majority of industries have tunnel vision. They pursue the same opportunities that everyone else pursues; they pass up the same opportunities everyone else passes up. Companies that perceive a different game will win big. The most crucial question for today’s innovators is, “What do you see that your competitors don’t?”

Tom Kelley borrows the term, vuja de from George Carlin in his book, The Art of Innovation. What does this mean? It entails looking at something familiar from a new angle, as if you had never seen it before, and using that new angle to establish a new line-of-sight into the future.

Regarding IT, I must stress that this does not imply that you must be on the cutting edge. You may not have the resources to invest in numerous areas of technology. Still, you must ask yourself, “What must we accomplish to secure the future readiness of our IT organization and ensure the ability of our business to move forward?” One answer is to modernize the DIY on-premises desktop virtualization solution that is being crushed under its own weight of complexity, and the resources needed to support and operate it. The legacy vendors in the virtual desktop space give you the blocks in yellow, hand you a manual, and push you off to tackle this yourself. You are now suddenly responsible for all of the blocks in blue. This is the business that our customers want to get out of. This is the complexity that is crushing business today.

How Can Workspot Help You Get There?

Workspot provides THE cloud-native DaaS solution to help you ensure future readiness and enable your business to advance. I would challenge our future customers to look at modernizing their desktop virtualization solution with a new perspective. Our customers go from suffocating under the weight of their legacy desktop / VDI solution, to now being able to breathe and concentrate on new strategic tasks of IT that enable the business to adapt more quickly to change, and capture the opportunities that present themselves. Why? Because Workspot takes the weight of IT complexity and applies the concept of vuja de by handling all of the blocks in orange for you:

Those of you with an on-premises desktop virtualization solution or who have thought about moving your organization’s desktop workload to the cloud should experience vuja de. Take another look at the solution that is helping customers deliver on the three pillars of flexibility, responsiveness, and proactivity.

So what does this modernization journey look like? It varies with each customer, but the overall process follows the same path. We see three modernization scenarios playing out today:

The Go-Live Deployment Services mentioned above are included in the subscription price. We don’t just hand you a manual and send you off to do this yourself. We build a true partnership with our customers and guide them on their custom journey to delivering Cloud PCs. We remain engaged and ready to assist, even long after the solution has been rolled out into production.

So how do you get started with us? Schedule a demo!

The post Cloud PCs Are a Strategic Imperative NOW appeared first on Workspot.

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

Where are we in the cloud journey?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is the disconnect?

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

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

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

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

What cloud-first success looks like

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

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

Going all-in on Workspot cloud workstations

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

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

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

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

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

COVID-19 Business Resilience Challenges Today

We’re experiencing a significant BC event – the coronavirus COVID-19. I have some trepidation writing about this in such direct terms because one might think Workspot is being opportunistic in the face of a serious situation in which people are losing their lives. But it’s precisely the seriousness of the rapid spread of this illness that is compelling me to address it head-on. As I stayed on top of the latest news I learned a new term last week which is a standard part of Public Health parlance – “Social Distancing” –  which is the practice of avoiding close interaction with other people in an attempt to limit the spread of disease. The World Health Organization defines this as maintaining at least 3 feet (1 meter) distance between yourself and anyone who is coughing or sneezing. This makes sense in a more normal cold and flu season, but with COVID-19 it is believed that asymptomatic people are also spreading the disease – so from whom do you keep your distance? One can wait for the Public Health authorities to require social distancing by canceling large events and shutting down gathering places such as movie theaters and public transportation, or we can choose to take voluntary action as individuals and corporations.

Social Distancing Includes Remote Working

We all need to take meaningful steps to help stop the spread of this virus. In addition to the obvious handwashing and disinfection steps individuals must take, this is decidedly where corporate leadership comes in. Smart companies recognize that their people are the most valuable asset they have and keeping them safe is their top priority. One way to do so is to allow people to work from home, thereby mitigating their exposure to the virus and reducing the risk of asymptomatic transmission. Each day, we’re seeing new examples of the kind of leadership we need now. Major, global corporations aren’t waiting around for government edicts; many are instructing, if not requiring, their employees to work from home. They are canceling their large customer events and reinventing them as virtual events. It simply stands to reason that choosing social distancing for ourselves early in a disease outbreak rather than waiting for public authorities to require it can mitigate its spread. Unfortunately, in this case, if we wait for the bureaucrats to tell us what to do, it might be too late. The steps leading companies are taking is normalizing remote working, and it’s going to save lives.

Workspot Customers Are Protecting their People

As you might imagine, as a company that enables remote work with our cloud desktop solution on Microsoft Azure, we are having more conversations than usual about how we can help in this crisis. Many of our existing customers are expanding their Workspot cloud desktop implementations as a direct result of the COVID-19 threat as they take the important step of preparing for all their people to work from home. The good news is that we are able to spin up these new cloud desktops anywhere in the world they are needed – in hours (sometimes in minutes). Here are three examples of how our customers are responding.

Global Law Firm Prepares for COVID-19 Business Resilience in Europe

This customer came to Workspot with an initial use case of supporting mobility for their attorneys and staff. But they always had disaster recovery in mind as a natural use case for our cloud desktops. Since the desktop is delivered from the cloud, the end-user can be anywhere – at home, at a hotel, at the courthouse – and they can securely access all their case information from their device of choice. This is the “built-in” disaster recovery nature of cloud desktops. But the firm took this a step further and secured another large pool of “standby” cloud desktops, which can be activated by their IT team at any team. These standby desktops are outfitted with their corporate Windows image just like their everyday cloud desktops, so they are up-to-date and ready to go at any time they are needed. This gives the firm a solid remote work plan that can be executed in minutes. They astutely realized that business resilience is not all about recovery. Having the “insurance policy” for when a disaster strikes – such as a fire or flood – is critical for sure. But cloud desktops will also help them to proactively mitigate the negative consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak, so they are ready to send people home to work until the crisis is over. As part of their plan, they are expanding their Workspot cloud desktop implementation.

Major U.S. Design/Build Firm Planned for Hurricanes But is Now Ready for COVID-19

Another customer implemented Workspot GPU cloud workstations for their CAD engineers after a legacy VDI solution failed to deliver the performance they needed. They came to us with the top priority of supporting an aggressive corporate growth initiative that would entail having the ability to pursue new business beyond prior geographical boundaries. At the same time, the IT team had serious concerns about their ability to bounce back from a business disruption. Having had a close call with a hurricane and with wildfires in California that threatened their branch offices, they knew they had to improve their business continuity plan. With their Workspot implementation came the ability for all of their employees and contractors, even those who require high-performance computing, to work from anywhere, using a low-cost endpoint such as a Microsoft Surface Go. While they planned for recovery scenarios, they’re now well-prepared to reduce the risk of COVID-19 for all their employees by sending them home to work – while also continuing to keep projects on track for their customers.

Japanese Enterprise Sends Its Employees Home with Workspot

As we know, Japan is being hard hit by COVID-19. One of our customers came to us on Monday urgently asking for additional cloud desktop licenses so they can send all of their employees home to work. Under normal circumstances, this is a significant value point for our solution, because our customers can quickly and easily scale their Workspot implementation to respond to business expansion. In this case, the company’s top priority is the safety of its employees, and right now that means sending them home to work using a cloud desktop. Our customer success team reacted to the request immediately, and they’re able to spin up all the extra cloud desktops in hours. We applaud their leadership and we wish them well during this difficult time.

Two Primary COVID-19 Business Resilience Approaches

Workspot customers can address COVID-19 business resilience in two primary ways:

Every Day Cloud Desktops Have Built-in Business Resilience

Cloud desktops inherently provide disaster recovery capabilities, because they can be delivered to any device available to the user, anywhere on the planet. Users who have a cloud desktop as their “everyday” desktop can work from home during this time and have complete access to all their usual applications and data. Since most enterprises already have collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, as well as virtual meeting solutions such as Zoom, there’s no learning curve or transition period. People just get comfortable at home and they get to work.

Standby Cloud Desktops Are Activated On-Demand During a Crisis

Many people still use a physical desktop.  In this case, as part of a business continuity plan, the IT team can set up a pool of “standby” cloud desktops. These cloud desktops are kept up to date with the latest corporate Windows image, so when they are needed, they are activated and ready to go. As long as it’s safe for people to come to the office, they can continue to use their physical desktops.  But once the company makes the call to send people home, the standby desktops can be activated with a single click, people can head home and continue working on whatever devices they have at home, or from a corporate-owned mobile device, such as a tablet or laptop. The standby cloud desktops can be used for as long as the threat persists, and then they can be returned deactivated and return to their standby status.

COVID-19 Driving Higher Demand for Cloud Desktops

As we react to the growing demand for cloud desktops, it strikes us that there could actually be capacity constraints at the major cloud providers. The sheer number of companies adding cloud desktops to their risk mitigation arsenal is one reason, but a more subtle reason is the overall supply chain constraints we’re seeing as a result of the virus. Can the major cloud providers actually obtain the servers they need for their cloud data centers to keep up with demand? We’re keeping a close eye on this as we seek to take care of our customers’ needs.

The post COVID-19 Business Resilience: Cloud Desktops Are A Simple Solution for a Complex Challenge appeared first on Workspot.

In the VDI world, there are several classes of solutions that take very different approaches:

• Legacy VDI: The customer buys all the components, integrates them, and operates and maintains the VDI solution
• Legacy DaaS: A service provider operates the VDI stack on behalf of the customer
• Broker as a Service: A vendor operates the VDI broker, as a service for its customers, but the customer is still responsible for operating much of the stack
• Cloud Desktops: The vendor provides cloud desktops through a turnkey, SaaS model

While there is no longer much controversy about whether virtual desktops deliver value, it’s not always easy to know what’s possible (and what is not!) with each approach and exactly what questions to ask vendors when you’re evaluating the options. Our new framework can help you dive deep, consider your requirements in the context of what is actually possible today (you might be surprised!), truly understand the tradeoffs you will face, determine your priorities, and know what you can expect from the different approaches. I’ve also outlined the qualifying questions IT leaders should ask vendors so they can be sure that when they select a solution, the unique requirements of all their users are met. So without further ado, here it is – The GET Framework for VDI.

The GET Framework for VDI

How well products stack up against the three primary criteria in the GET Framework for VDI is driven by the architectural decisions vendors make as they build their products. For IT decision makers, understanding the architecture behind the various VDI approaches is critical because if you understand the architecture, it becomes clear what the relative capabilities are of each approach. The GET Framework for VDI Triangle in the next figure illustrates the tension that is created as these architectural decisions are made, and what solution capability tradeoffs customers are forced to make as a result. Let’s explore each dimension.

Critical Architectural Decisions for Cloud VDI

Every VDI vendor has made architecture decisions around characteristics in the GET triangle, and those decisions impact product functionality and whether or not that product meets your requirements. Here’s where the rubber meets the road. To dive into more details of what specific capabilities are enabled (or not), read the Executive Brief: The GET Framework for VDI. Meantime, consider the following:

• Single-Tenant vs. Multi-Tenant: Since enterprise requirements are very customized, it is easiest to meet all those requirements with a single tenant architecture. Most legacy VDI solutions are single tenant solutions, while all successful SaaS solutions are multi-tenant – you can replicate the single tenant stack for a few customers, but that architecture does not scale to thousands or millions of customers. Do you need to be able to easily and quickly scale your cloud desktop solution up and down as business needs change?
• Integrated Stack vs. Separate Control & Data Planes: All successful SaaS solutions are fully integrated solution stacks. Salesforce does not ask you to bring your own database. Workday does not ask you to bring your own UI. But the more you integrate the entire stack in a single data center, the more difficult it becomes to provide the service worldwide. In the case of business SaaS solutions, this is less of an issue, because the vendor can provide great performance by implementing a few copies of the integrated stack in data centers around the world. However, when it comes to virtual desktops, the stakes are completely different, because the proximity of the stack to the end user is key to performance. Therefore, the integrated VDI solution stack would have to be replicated in hundreds of locations around the world to deliver good performance, which is not sustainable from a resource and cost standpoint. So an integrated VDI stack is not the right fit for providing global coverage and outstanding virtual desktop performance. On the other hand, an architecture that separates the control & data plane is well-suited for achieving both global scalability and great performance for users, no matter where they are located geographically. Do you need to support users across different geographies? Do some of your users run GPU-intensive apps?
• Single Data Center/Hundreds of Regions: Since most enterprise software deployments are implemented in only a few data centers, it is easiest to meet the requirements if the solution is architected for a single data center, but in the era of massive compute power, a single data center architecture is a mismatch, because it precludes core capabilities that I imagine you’ll expect to have, such as easy scalability across cloud regions. Today we know that better-than-physical-PC performance is possible, but to achieve it, virtual desktops must be placed close to each end user, and for that, you need a solution that scales horizontally to hundreds of regions. Are all your users within 25 ms of a data center? If not, latency will cause the performance problems for which legacy VDI solutions are notorious.

The GET Scorecard: How Do the Approaches Stack Up?

The bottom line? Here’s the GET Scorecard for VDI solutions. Across the top, we have the four approaches to virtual desktops, and we have the three primary capabilities in the GET Framework for VDI. We’ve scored each of the three primary evaluation criteria for each VDI approach. This should help you quickly focus in on the capabilities that are most important to you, and which VDI approach can best provide them to you. What are your requirements, and which tradeoffs are you willing to make? It’s very difficult, if not impossible, for any one solution to execute perfectly in all three dimensions. Our view of the world is that if your cloud desktop solution does not simplify IT in a way that allows you to reallocate IT resources to strategic projects instead of micromanaging VDI, it’s time to reevaluate. If your cloud desktop solution will not scale horizontally across cloud regions in minutes, it’s time to reevaluate.  Those capabilities are what’s going to deliver business agility, and agility is what positions your company for growth. That’s the whole reason you’re moving to the cloud in the first place, right?

The Workspot GET Advantage

Our customers are innovating in ways even our team, with our many years of experience with VDI, didn’t think were possible with virtual desktops; the other available solutions simply can’t get the job done. That’s what customers tell us! Now that doesn’t mean we’re perfect – no solution is – but we are delivering way beyond what is possible with legacy VDI or DaaS, and we are constantly innovating, inspired by our customers’ needs. We’re able to achieve all of this because we have carefully architected our solution to take full advantage of the massive cloud scale that is available today, and in doing so we’ve created a competitive advantage, just like the one we’d like to help you create! For more details, be sure to read the Executive Brief: The GET Framework for VDI Solutions.

If you’re ready to hear more, schedule a quick demo!

The post Score with the GET Framework for VDI Solutions! appeared first on Workspot.

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Working closely with our business partners, the Dudek IT team tackled a complicated technology challenge that when solved, became a significant differentiator for our firm and competitive advantage because of the value we are uniquely delivering to our clients. Our journey also tells the bigger story of how a willingness to continually innovate is good both for customers and for business growth.

Align IT with business strategy

Gone are the days where the success of an IT department is simply measured by how quickly incidents are resolved or requests are fulfilled; while important, it’s no longer enough in this age where every business is a digital business. In Dudek IT, we view it as our role to make technology choices that further business goals. I’ve been fortunate to work closely with the entire Dudek leadership team to help define our firm’s business strategy. The technology landscape changes fast, affecting both our internal infrastructure choices as well as the solutions we offer our customers. If the IT strategy is not in lock-step with the business strategy, IT will become an anchor slowing the business down.

Future-proof everything

It’s in the context of developing innovative product offerings for our clients that we arrived at the conclusion that our on-premises datacenter could not take Dudek where we wanted to go as a business. By 2017 we had developed a fast-growing division of the business around Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) flights – drones! The service turned out to be of such high value to our customers that we quickly found ourselves running up against the limits of our IT infrastructure to deliver outcomes based on flight data, in an actionable format, quickly. Producing the highly graphics-intensive maps and other project deliverables from the images collected by drone flights could take as much as five days for a large project involving many acres of land, and sometimes it could take even longer if we were unlucky enough to experience a random power outage or other hardware problem. With multiple drone pilots working on large concurrent projects around the U.S., the time-consuming processing of images and data collected became acute. Even though we could have continued to use traditional VDI, when we looked further into the future, we knew it was not the solution to the growth constraints we faced. It was time to innovate!

Prove business value

Technology deployments limiting your ability to serve your customers puts your entire business at risk. An IT team has to be brave enough to welcome change and, at times, take a few calculated risks. When we were facing five-day turnaround times for processing drone images, we had to change the way we had been working, in order to grow that business. We could buy more physical GPU workstations, expand our existing VDI implementation, or take a calculated risk with the possibility of completely transforming the firm in terms of creating new opportunities. As we explored options, we found the possibility of cloud workstations highly intriguing and understood that the technology could be a game changer. Fortunately, I was able to turn to two of my peers, CIOs at other AEC firms who had experience with cloud workstations, to discuss their experience with moving their GPU workstations to the cloud. Those conversations supported our decision to proceed with a proof of concept with Workspot. The outcome was the proof we needed: Image processing that previously took 5 days, took only 6 hours with Workspot cloud workstations. The ROI for that use case was a complete no-brainer. We proved we had a solution that not only solved a very tricky business challenge, but that also put us on a path to innovation for other use cases, and that is turning out to be truly transformational.

Align. Innovate. Prove. Repeat.

My team and I will continue to explore, and to question the status quo. It’s an ongoing commitment that is part of our DNA. We stay closely aligned with our business partners, and we never stop thinking about how we can innovate to make the business better. We have to prove that our technology choices deliver value to our customers and to Dudek. And then we do it all over again! Not only is this how my team believes we can help Dudek grow, but it’s also what we love to do – work with technology partners who share the same spirit of innovation and commitment to serving their customers that we have. That’s what we’ve found with Workspot.

The post Guest Blog: CIO Brian Nordmann on How IT Teams Can Create Competitive Advantages appeared first on Workspot.

Got Power Users? Set Them Free with Cloud Workstations!

Speaking of being an IT hero brings us to the second use case I want to talk about. It’s another small step to the cloud you can take that will have a huge impact on the business.

We engage with many CIOs in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry because they have a huge problem: They need virtual desktops because of the nature of their projects, but on-premises solutions just don’t deliver the performance required for power users. We’ve heard it (and seen it) countless times. Forward-thinking CIOs try legacy VDI because they need greater flexibility and agility than physical workstations can provide, but time and again these projects fail. Similarly, organizations in manufacturing, life sciences or any industry that has design engineers manipulating 3D/4D images or visualizing massive amounts of data know that a large amount of processing power is needed to deal with resource-hungry graphics applications such as AutoCAD, Revit, SOLIDWORKS and many more. This is why design teams will often relocate when they are working on a large design project, whether it’s a new commercial airliner, a new stadium or a hospital campus – they have to be able to collaborate with other project teams in real-time. In the absence of the right technology, physical proximity to the team is essential for success. For this power-user use case, physical workstations and VDI just don’t cut it.

What if you could solve for this use case in your organization with one small step? There’d be no more need to relocate project teams, you could then hire the best talent regardless of where that person lives, you could avoid the expense of opening branch offices, designers could collaborate in real-time both within the firm and across partners in a joint venture, and they’d love you forever because you gave them the ability to work at home, at a project site, in a hotel – anywhere!

The Top 9 Growth Accelerators AEC IT Teams Can Impact

Our AEC customers have told us that addressing these nine things are key to growing the business, and you can impact every one of them with just one small step. If you replaced VDI and physical workstations with cloud  GPU workstations just for your CAD and BIM users, you can completely transform the business. Our AEC customers, including Mead & Hunt, C&S Engineering, Dudek, and more, are great examples. These CIOs chose cloud workstations, which enable their firms to:

1. Win bigger projects in any location
2. Launch those projects faster
3. Participate in more joint ventures
4. Make collaboration easier
5. Hire engineers anywhere
6. Work from anywhere on any device
7. Protect IP and simplify disaster recovery
8. Drive business efficiency & continuity
9. Innovate faster

Plus, the possibilities for supporting new uses cases are very exciting too!

When you can deploy cloud workstations anywhere in the world, in minutes, across Azure regions globally, the possibilities become really exciting. The firm can bid on projects anywhere, scale up and down in minutes to meet project needs, teams can collaborate on 3D/4D models and large datasets in real-time, and power users can work anywhere. IT teams are able to make better use of their time since they no longer have to troubleshoot VDI, or provision and maintain physical workstations. Cloud workstations are always up to date, so there’s no patching, updating or maintenance. The business has overall greater agility to pursue new business, IP is better protected, and disaster recovery plans are strengthened with cloud region failover and standby cloud workstations.

You can achieve all of that, by taking one small step to address the power-user use case! That seems like time really well spent. Workspot works with you, side by side, to deploy your cloud workstations in Azure – fast. Flat rate pricing per user (including the cost of Azure and Go-Live Services) takes all of the guesswork out of cloud computing. Predictability, flexibility, agility for the business – check! Power users are freed from the constraints of the office and get better-than-workstation performance – check! IT has fewer headaches, adds tremendous value to the business, and gets to be heroes for  change – check!

Ready to take a step in the right direction for your power users? Schedule a live demo and we’ll show you how it works!

Watch the video to hear what CAD managers think about

Workspot Workstation Cloud.

The post Small Step to the Cloud Part 2: GPU Power Users Have Waited Long Enough appeared first on Workspot.

These days, many organizations have a cloud-first strategy – an actual mandate from the top down to de-invest in data center infrastructure and migrate IT assets to a public cloud. VDI workloads are one of the first things that get moved to the cloud because making the move not only alleviates complexity, cost and performance headaches, it also opens new doors for use cases that could never have worked well with an on-prem VDI solution. Other organizations are taking a more measured approach, either because they have data center infrastructure investments to see through or because their current VDI solution works adequately for many of their users, and the IT team isn’t ready to mess with that formula. We say “fair enough.” IT people have so much on their plates that they really need to choose their battles. Workspot can help you choose a high-impact battle that takes only a few small steps to win.

The Small Steps Matter

VDI experts have been fighting in the trenches for more than a decade. Anyone with VDI experience knows what it takes to implement and manage on-premises virtual desktops, and let’s face it – it’s not easy. If you’ve been in the trenches, you’ve accumulated an impressive skill set for managing VDI. The reality however, is that while you may have VDI mastered for some use cases, there are other use cases that just can’t be satisfied with an on-premises approach – the laws of physics aren’t going to cooperate.  As an IT Leader, this is where you can take a small step that can make a huge difference to the business. We all know that one of the most significant benefits of virtual desktops is that it can be a huge productivity booster because suddenly people can work anywhere, at anytime, using any device. This works really well for users who are close to the data center where their virtual desktops live, because latency is low, so they see great app response times. On the other hand, users who are remote from the data center location do experience latency, and it can kill  productivity. No amount of your amazing VDI skills is going to change that reality.

If it Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It

Bert Lance, Jimmy Carter’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, made this phrase famous in 1977 when he stated that he believed he could save the country billions if he could just get the government to adopt this simple motto: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” He explained: “That’s the trouble with government: Fixing things that aren’t broken and not fixing things that are broken.” It applies to our discussion of VDI here too. If VDI is working well for a portion of your users, don’t “fix” it; keep your current solution in place if that makes sense for you, but fix the performance issues your remote users are having.

Solving the Latency Problem for Remote VDI Users

We’ve all experienced the frustration of slow application response times. It always seems to happen when you’re under pressure to make a deadline, and when that happens for your users, they will likely complain to IT.  It’s not necessary to put your users – or your IT team – through this pain anymore. The battle to deliver outstanding performance to remote users is worth waging because now, it’s easy to win, it will free up your time and make your life more pleasant when users are happier, and improving productivity goes directly to the bottom line. That is the very definition of strategic IT: Innovating to support business growth. Since you can’t address this problem with on-prem VDI, you need a different way to address what’s broken. For users who are feeling the pain of slow response times due to latency, you can make a change that is easy, enterprise-ready, has low TCO, is secure, and features 99.95% availability: Workspot Desktop Cloud on Microsoft Azure. All you have to do is just locate a cloud PC in the public cloud region closest to each user. With Microsoft Azure’s 50+ regions around the world, most users will be less than 50ms away. That means really, really fast app response times. So now, instead of listening to all those complaints about slow performance, why not kill latency instead of productivity? Just give your remote users a cloud PC. Easy. Then the messages you get will sound more like this: “I can’t believe how fast the performance is!”, or my favorite customer quote: “We’re seeing ridiculous speed with Workspot on Azure.”. That’s what you want to hear! Everyone who is close to the data center and getting decent performance can just keep on keepin’ on with their VDI desktops, and you won’t have added to your workload because Workspot runs your new cloud PCs for you (but you can take all the credit!).

Take that Small Step

Taking small steps really can be better than taking a giant leap. We get that, and we can help you fix this single use case, and you can make a big difference. By solving the pain of unacceptable latency for remote users, you’re actually creating new opportunities for your business, and we’re willing to bet that won’t go unnoticed.  We’ll make sure your cloud PC implementation is a winner! See how it works by scheduling a live demo with us, and feel free to ask all your hard questions.

The post VDI Experts: Take One Small Step to the Cloud Instead of a Giant Leap appeared first on Workspot.

Listen, Thank and Eject

Far be it from me to judge, but Kondo’s methods make me wonder about IT teams who are hanging on to their data centers and their physical PCs and workstations too long. As Kondo suggests, maybe you should “listen” to your servers, routers, switches, PCs, $10K GPU workstations, and your legacy VDI clutter. When you do, what are they saying to you? “You just don’t deserve anything better than this.” You’re destined to be a slave to infrastructure.” “You don’t have anything better to do anyway, might as well micromanage VDI.” Clearly, none of your infrastructure actually “sparks joy”. Am I right? Well then, it’s time to take a tip from Marie Kondo; “thank” all your outdated IT infrastructure, and then get rid of it. Now you can move on! Moving on in this context means preparing your organization for the future – for all the new business opportunities you can pursue when you have IT solutions that are flexible, that scale across the globe in minutes, and that save time and money. Moving on means new-found business agility that Cloud PCs and cloud GPU workstations offer.

Workspot Sparks Joy

So what do you think about these Cloud PC benefits? Do they spark joy for you?

• Access to 50+ “data centers” via Microsoft Azure
• Better than physical PC performance
• Easy, horizontal scalability across the planet
• Predictable costs with flat monthly pricing
• One-click PC disaster recovery to protect the business

Our customers tell us these are keepers, and you can’t achieve any of them with on-prem VDI or physical PCs, but you can with Workspot Desktop Cloud and Workstation Cloud. Here’s how:

50 Data Centers? Sure, Why Not?

It’s time to think big. Latency has actually made your data center joyless for IT and users alike. In a blog from November, our CEO, Amitabh Sinha envisions VDI that spans 1000 data centers. Why? Because we can. Workspot’s architecture uniquely allows us to actually do this. No one else can.

Performance You’ve Only Dreamed About

Over and over our GPU workstation solution on Azure has been put through rigorous testing by CAD engineers, the most demanding users on Earth, and by architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) IT teams – the biggest virtual desktop skeptics on Earth. Bottom line? We’ve set a new standard for virtual desktop performance that is literally transforming the AEC industry. That is some serious joy!

Planet-Scale Virtual Desktops

Computing in the cloud era required a whole new architecture, so Workspot invented it. It’s cloud-native, and that’s really important, but only a globally distributed architecture will give you horizontal scalability across Azure regions around the planet. That means that every new cloud region made available brings compute power closer to the edge and closer to the user. That’s the Workspot difference!

Predictable Costs and Better TCO

We took a close look at the three primary ways of deploying virtual desktops: On-prem VDI, Do-it-yourself cloud desktops, and Workspot’s turnkey cloud PC service on Azure. After crunching the numbers and testing them with some customers, we found that Workspot is saving them 30-40% over the other deployment models – and those numbers are conservative. So for additional joy, Workspot offers lower total cost of ownership ( TCO) and predictable, flat monthly pricing!

Simplify & Improve Disaster Recovery

It’s time to say “thank you” to that mobile recovery unit you have on order and that alternative office space at-the-ready, and then cancel those services. The modern way to get people back to work after a business disruption is to make sure they are in a safe place, then turn on their cloud PCs with just one click. While there’s no notion of joy in this, it’s good to know that if disaster does strike, you’ll have a simple and affordable way to get the business on the road to recovery.

No Reason to Wait

Virtual desktops with better than physical PC performance, available today across 50+ Azure cloud regions, that are enterprise-ready, ease disaster recovery, and offer business agility at levels never possible previously – all with predictable pricing and the lowest TCO – that sure sounds good!

Like the many people who’ve found inspiration in “tidying up” their homes, I hope you’ll be inspired to take your organization into the future. Say your final goodbyes to your data center and find peace-of-mind and joy in your new cloud PCs!

The post Tidy Up Your IT Infrastructure & Find Joy in Cloud Desktops! appeared first on Workspot.

What’s Agility Got to Do With IT?

When we see IT innovation in a company, inevitably there’s an IT leader behind it who asks lots of questions. That’s what affords them the ability to anticipate and embrace change and that’s what creates agility. Granted, “business agility” is quite the overused buzzword, but it’s nonetheless important, because being able to respond and adapt to change quickly is the essence of being a customer-centric business. If you’re responsible for technology decisions for your business, it’s a really exciting time, because with cloud computing, the ability to become more agile has never been greater, and the rewards have never been more attractive or achievable. When you go beyond the buzzword, here’s what it looks like when Workspot customers achieve unprecedented levels of business agility.

Unique Challenges in AEC Firms

A great example of the possibilities that agility brings to business growth is in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. AEC firms have some really unique challenges when it comes to end user computing, not the least of which is the very demanding nature of their power users; CAD and BIM pros need great performance from their workstations – there can be no compromises.

Our AEC customers tell us that to grow their businesses they need to:

1. Win bigger projects in any location
2. Launch those projects faster
3. Participate in more joint ventures
4. Make collaboration easier
5. Hire engineers anywhere
6. Work from anywhere on any device
7. Protect IP and simplify disaster recovery
8. Drive business efficiency & continuity
9. Innovate faster

What are the options for enabling these nine growth factors? Let’s look at the tradeoffs.

Making the Right Technology Choices

Physical Workstations

Local workstations have been the mainstay of end user computing for design engineers using graphics-intensive apps because it’s the only way they’ve been able to achieve the app performance they need when working on 3D models and accessing large data sets. However, physical workstations inhibit growth. Designers and engineers are tethered to their desktops, and can only be productive while in the office. GPU workstations are expensive to acquire and maintain, and because of the nature of AEC projects, an office usually has to be opened near the project site – at significant expense. Of course, this all takes time, so project launches are slower than they need to be. When firms rely on physical workstations, 8 of the 9 growth objectives just aren’t achievable (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9). As for #3 – the joint venture relationships that are so prevalent among these firms – while doable, they’re operationally more painful and complex than they have to be.

On-premises VDI

The show stopper for AEC firms with on-prem VDI is typically poor performance. All your users would have to be very close to the on-prem data center, and even then we’ve been told the performance is just not acceptable. As we pointed out, “good enough” is not good enough for these power users. Even if you eked out decent response times (and that’s a big “if”), an on-prem VDI solution limits growth possibilities in many other ways. If you implement on-prem VDI, you cannot adequately address 6 of the 9 growth objectives! (1, 2, 4, 5, 8, & 9).

Workspot Cloud Workstations

Cloud Workstations have proven to be a transforming technology solution for AEC firms. How is that? The first hurdle is to solve any lingering issues with performance. We’ve done that; our customers are seeing as good or better performance than their local workstations, and that opens a whole new world of possibilities. In this video, Rebecca Yu, CAD Manager for engineering firm Mead & Hunt, has experienced more than her share of virtual workstation evaluations – she knows great performance when she sees it!

Here’s how Workspot cloud workstations enable all 9 AEC growth factors:

1. Cloud workstations can be deployed anywhere in the world, in minutes, giving you the agility to bid on and win bigger projects, globally.

2. Quickly spin up additional cloud workstations to accommodate new projects and dynamically scale up and down to meet resource requirements.

3. Simplify joint venture processes to drive efficiency.

4. Collaborate in real-time on 3D models and large datasets.

5. Hire the best talent anywhere without the need for a physical office.

6. Enable anywhere-productivity and creativity for CAD and BIM experts.

7. Always have the latest OS and patches to augment security & protect IP. Protect the business with “standby” cloud workstations that are activated with one click during a disaster.

8. Reduce or eliminate infrastructure & physical workstations, make better use of IT resources, reduce OpEx.

9. Drive innovation through better collaboration, on-site customer consultation, and highly-functional joint venture partnerships.

In the video below, industry visionary and Mead & Hunt CIO Andy Knauf describes his journey to Workspot on Microsoft Azure. Andy is also interviewed by Enterprise CIO editor James Bourne here. Enjoy!

Ready for a live demo of Workstation Cloud?  Request a demo!

The post The Top 9 Growth Factors for AEC & The Key to Achieving Them appeared first on Workspot.