I’m finishing up week 5 of extreme social distancing, including avoiding breathing the “slipstream” of my fellow humans while walking/running in the evenings. Even as an introvert, it feels really bizarre to avoid all “outsiders” at all costs, but such is our world today. The entire Workspot team continues to work remotely as we help our customers do the same, and we are wishing you and yours good health first and foremost, and I also hope you are sharing some unusually special moments of joy with your loved ones. This week I wanted to share some of the feedback we’ve heard from customers during this really stressful time for IT teams, employees, and their families. My intent is not so much to “toot Workspot’s horn,” (although I am guilty of this for sure), rather it’s to share real-world, first-hand details of what IT teams and end-users are experiencing right now with their cloud desktops and workstations so you know what’s possible today. I have kept these quotes anonymous for simplicity, but in most (if not all) cases, these customers would be happy to share their experience during a phone call or online meeting if you’re interested in pursuing that.
IT Heroes Make Seamless Remote Working Real
During the last few weeks, end-users have fully realized that their IT teams are true heroes. Until now, they probably haven’t thought much about the constant brainpower, foresight, and planning that goes on behind the scenes to ensure a reliable, performant end-user computing experience. That has certainly come into sharp focus during the last few weeks.
The Workspot team spends more time with IT folks than we do end-users because we partner closely with IT to deploy their cloud desktops and workstations fast. Our Customer Success Team is over-the-top impressive; they often embed themselves (remotely) with our customers which creates a “shared success” environment that allows enterprise organizations to achieve the industry’s fastest time to value. That’s how we know the details of the various journeys our customers have been on before arriving at their cloud desktop destination. Often they are making the leap from physical desktops and workstations to cloud desktops. Sometimes they’ve experienced more pain because they took a detour from physical desktops to on-premises VDI, and that didn’t go very well. By the time these IT leaders find Workspot, they can be pretty tired of fighting the cost, complexity and performance battles; they are ready for success, and that’s our favorite product to deliver! Here are a few ways cloud desktop end users are appreciating their IT teams right now:
“We are incredibly grateful to our IT team for setting up our employees to work from home so seamlessly via Workspot. Because of their expertise, our firm can continue to support clients, plan for future projects, and most importantly keep our employees safe.”
“Our IT staff is doing an amazing job.”
“Thanks for putting us in such a great spot with technology before all this happened!”
“We often don’t realize what a great job the IT team does because things just plain work. It takes a lot of hard work and planning to keep this many people running smoothly. Thank you, IT!”
End-Users Demand Great Performance
Legacy VDI has a long history of frustrated users experiencing slow app performance, and there’s no doubt this limited acceptance of the solution. Some of our customers who’ve tried on-premises VDI found that users were at least 20% less productive. That lost productivity (not to mention unhappy people) can quickly offset the benefits that might be gained. Today, with so many people working from home, chances are that poor performance is causing them to be less productive. Workspot customers are having a totally different experience:
“I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for Workspot, Panzura, and Azure, we would not have been able to survive this virus.”
“I finally went into Workspot and it’s very nice. It moves fast and Microstation opens instantly, which is an amazing improvement compared to what I was doing before. I’d say everything is just as fast as being in the office so far. I’m looking forward to using this.”
“Received a call from the person running the most profitable group in the company. He thanked IT for getting them Workspot and let me know that in the last three weeks his department productivity rose 2%.”
The IT leaders we work with put their end-users first. They know that if the performance is not as good or better than a physical PC or workstation, the solution is not going to be acceptable to users and adoption will fail. The great news is that you don’t have to worry about virtual desktop performance any longer. Workspot on Azure has changed everything about desktop delivery, including making sure end-users are happy and productive. To understand this more fully, you can read our Executive Brief on “The New Math of VDI Performance.”
Three Business Continuity Pillars for Cloud Desktops
Of course, there are BC/DR capabilities built right into cloud desktops, because you can access them from anywhere, using whatever table, smartphone, or laptop you have available to you. That’s what has made it so easy for our customers to send their people to the safety of their homes to work. They just pick up right where they left off. Some of our architecture and engineering customers asked employees to take their large monitors home, or they purchased additional monitors so designers and engineers can have a multi-monitor environment at home too. If we count”built-in BC/DR”, there are really four pillars for cloud desktop business continuity. Combined with the following three, your ability to bolster your business continuity planning and execution has never been easier or more robust.
Business Continuity for Physical PCs
When people who depend on a physical PC or workstation for their day-to-day work can’t get to the office to access it, they need an alternative – fast. In this case, you can have a pool of “standby” cloud desktops that are only activated when there is a business disruption. Your IT team declares the DR status, and with a single click, activates the DR cloud desktop pool (or pools). For more details about how it works, here’s the Solution Brief to read at your convenience.
Cloud Desktop Backup/Recovery
Cloud desktops should be backed up like any other PC. Workspot Cloud Desktop Backup and Recovery lets you easily backup cloud desktops and workstations within their primary region. You can learn more about this in a previous blog here.
Multi-Region Resilience for Cloud Desktops
The first step is keeping your cloud desktops backed up in the primary region. Unfortunately, however, it’s possible for an entire cloud region to go down. What happens then? This was not an easy problem to solve, especially for persistent desktops. But our rockstar engineering team solved it and Workspot introduced the industry’s first solution for replicating both non-persistent and persistent desktops in an alternate region, which can be activated immediately if the primary cloud region experiences an outage. Read more about this important new feature here.
We are extremely grateful that during this challenging time, our customers have entrusted their business SLA to Workspot. We are all ready for anything!
If you’re ready to explore how Workspot cloud desktop solutions can benefit your organization, just request a demo here and we’ll set up a time to connect.
Stay safe!
