I hope you’re finding this blog series, “Forget Everything You Know About VDI”, helpful as you explore the options for modernizing and future-proofing end user computing. The first blog in the series is centered around performance, because commonly used VDI and VPN approaches to supporting remote work result in notoriously poor performance for remote users. Our second blog delves into the reasons for moving desktop workloads to the cloud in the first place, but “do-it-yourself” virtual desktop solutions from IaaS providers or virtual desktops hosted by MSPs aren’t the answer, because it’s likely you have a multi-cloud strategy.
Workspot is different. Our innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud desktop solution makes it simple for enterprise IT teams to deploy, operate, and scale virtual desktops in any region of Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. In this blog, we will focus on how we make it simple to deploy your first use case, and how you can then easily add tens, hundreds, or thousands of users across cloud regions globally (in minutes!) as your business changes and grows.
Simple, Turnkey SaaS Cloud PCs
Legacy VDI solutions are complex and rigid to deploy. IT must have a very good understanding of the scope of the project, because they have to architect and procure servers, storage, networking, and software for the forecasted number of users. This step is critical to get right because IT could seriously under-estimate – or even worse, over-estimate – the number of people who will be using the solution. Once the planning phase is complete, IT personnel and hired consultants spend months integrating the stack and testing the solution with a small set of pilot users. Ultimately, it could be upwards of 9-12 months before the project can go live. Consider this: After all that effort and money spent, you end up with VDI deployed in only one data center!
The legacy VDI stack is too complex to deploy and manage. Workspot solved the problem with its SaaS cloud PC solution.
To solve the operational complexity of VDI, we built a software-as-a-service (SaaS ) platform that delivers the entire VDI stack as a turnkey solution that is simple to deploy, manage and scale. We want our customers to think of deploying our cloud PC solution in the same way they would think about deploying PCs – except that it’s easier and faster with Workspot! Workspot cloud PCs are available in a wide range of CPU and GPU configurations. Simply choose the cloud PC configuration needed for your users, depending on what they need to accomplish in their roles. Workspot cloud PCs feature predictable, flat-rate pricing that includes cloud compute costs, deployment services, and support. Even better, your IT team can turn its attention to more important projects, because we take responsibility for delivering the highest business SLA, while your IT team also stays in control of the implementation. It’s truly the best of all worlds for IT.
Simple, Yet Enterprise-Class Cloud PCs
You might consider other SaaS solutions for virtual desktops that are simple to deploy; in some cases you might be able to swipe a credit card and get a desktop! But the devil is in the details as they say. With these solutions you typically get a vanilla image that is a Windows 10 “experience” rather than a true, customizable Windows 10 cloud desktop. With those solutions, you have to install your own applications, and there’s going to be a learning curve for your team because it’s highly unlikely that you can use your existing management tools and IT processes.
We started with the recognition that every enterprise has unique requirements, including:
- Custom corporate Windows 10 image
- Custom corporate apps
- Custom MFA
- Custom corporate security policies & tools
- Custom image management tools (like SCCM)
While we engineered the Workspot SaaS platform to be incredibly simple to use, it is also able to integrate with your custom Windows 10 images, security policies, image management tools, and more. This is ideal for IT teams because it doesn’t disrupt the tools and policies they already have in place; you just deploy your Workspot cloud PCs and both IT and users hit the ground running.
Our Customer Success Team is Key to Your Success
For 80% of our customers, Workspot is their first workload in the public cloud. Our Customer Success Team is comprised of phenomenal virtual desktop industry experts, and their goal is your success. They work closely with your team to understand your initial use cases and where your users are located in the world. They assess what kind of networking options you have to connect with the cloud, and they help you deploy your corporate Windows 10 image in the cloud, implement MFA, and address your questions.
Probably the most critical aspect of the initial session with Workspot Customer Success is to understand the network topology: In which regions of the public cloud should we place the cloud PCs? How should the corporate data center be connected to the public cloud (typically site-to-site VPN)? Has any SD-WAN already been deployed? Your networking team is involved at each step as we bridge the cloud and data center networks. Depending on the availability of your networking team, this process can range from a few hours to several days.
In parallel, as the networking scenarios are addressed, we are working with your desktop team to create your corporate cloud PC image.
In a few days, your first set of cloud PCs are available for testing by IT. When they give their blessing, then we bring in users to give us their assessment on the experience. It can take a few days to a couple of weeks to optimize the image to deliver the best performance. We find that many customers have bloated images, and they take this opportunity to clean everything up.
Finally, once your end users are happy with the quality of their experience, we work with your project management team to roll out cloud PCs across multiple offices and multiple regions.
Our flat-rate subscription fees include 90 days of go-live services provided by our Customer Success Team. On average, we can be in production in less than 30 days, and we’ve achieved large deployments in far less time! The key to getting you up and running fast is working efficiently together – we’re on the same team!
Data & Continuous Learning Drives Simplicity
We don’t charge for these Customer Success services that take customers to production. This is a deliberate choice we made as we reinvented both VDI technology as well as the business model. Our #1 goal is to make sure that our customers are happy. Our Customer Success and Support teams are continuously learning with every customer implementation because every enterprise has unique needs. In addition, we collect real-time data from users’ activity to determine whether the users are able to connect to their cloud PCs and whether they are seeing great performance. We also analyze security behavioral data from inside the cloud PC. All of this helps us identify where any gaps while delivering the most reliable, highest quality experience to our customers. This deep understanding is continuously fed back into the product roadmap and results in ongoing improvements to all of the solution elements: clients, agents, gateways, control, data engine, and more. It’s an ongoing mission to make our solution even simpler to deploy, scale and operate.
Through real-time data collection and analysis, feedback is continuously used to deliver new platform features and improvements.
Be sure to catch next week’s blog! With your current solution, if it takes more than 5 minutes to add 1000 virtual desktop users around the globe, don’t miss our blog next week on how we make Workspot Cloud PCs easy to scale! If you can’t wait until then, be sure to schedule a demo and we’ll show you how we do it!
