The strong momentum for cloud adoption continues to be validated by industry analysts and in all of our conversations with CEOs and IT leaders. Gartner Research sees the cloud services industry growing exponentially through 2022. Forbes notes that 83 percent of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020. RightScale, now a part of Flexera, conducts their State of the Cloud survey each year and in 2019 revealed that companies plan to spend 24 percent more on public cloud in 2019 vs. 2018 and that public cloud spending is growing 3x faster than private cloud. At the same time, they uncovered the top concerns among CEOs and IT leaders who are considering a move to the cloud or are already cloud adopters. It’s generally accepted that the major public cloud providers do an amazing job of securing enterprise data and workloads, so security concerns are largely off the table these days. And with the favorable economics and business agility benefits of shedding on-premises data center infrastructure in favor of cloud infrastructure, the reasons to go all-in on the public cloud keep growing. Yet, as the RightScale survey reports, business and IT leaders still harbor concerns about moving to the cloud.
In this blog, I want to share my thoughts about these concerns. Most enterprises are looking to move more workloads to the cloud, so it’s important for business and IT leaders to understand that moving desktop workloads can be a high-return activity, given that they choose a solution that features specific characteristics to address these top concerns. Because of the complexity of deploying, managing and scaling virtual desktops, fulfilling the simplicity objectives of an organization’s cloud-first strategy requires a turnkey cloud VDI solution.
#1 Cloud Concern: TCO
Workspot’s Response: Flat-Rate Cloud Desktop Pricing
As cloud usage increases, so do the challenges around managing cloud cost variability. The RightScale survey noted that “64 percent of all respondents cite optimizing cloud spend as the top initiative.” According to the survey results, that number is even higher among intermediate and advanced cloud users at 70 percent and 76 percent, respectively. Clearly, organizations are experiencing pain stemming from the unknown that is typical of cloud compute costs.
Particularly in our engagements with large enterprises, the scope of this issue is huge. One can imagine the effort involved in parsing complex billing from cloud providers to validate accuracy, plus the additional steps to charge each department for usage. While Workspot can’t solve this issue in its entirety, our turnkey cloud VDI service on Azure goes a long way toward alleviating it. Featuring flat-rate pricing that includes the cost of Azure compute, this essential turnkey service feature means that cloud desktop costs are completely predictable.
#2 Cloud Concern: Business SLA
Workspot’s Response: 99.95% Global Cloud Desktop SLA
Whether migrating from physical desktops or legacy VDI, the organizations we speak with are ready to relinquish responsibility for desktop service level agreements (SLA). The reason, of course, is the complexity of troubleshooting and maintaining these resources. The opportunity cost of using valuable IT resources this way is significant when you consider the tremendous value these people could be contributing to business strategy instead. Owning the SLA for cloud desktops is a key characteristic of a turnkey service because it alleviates the IT team from having to worry about break/fix plans and waiting around for hours or days for the “fix”. As for legacy VDI, most IT teams aren’t able to quantify the availability of the solution; yet they all have tales to tell about the pain it causes when something breaks and people from across IT disciplines have to try to figure out where the failure occurred and what to do about it. In both scenarios, that means user downtime. When evaluating cloud VDI solutions organizations must understand the cloud desktop SLAs for various vendors and what those choices mean for their implementation. For example, an SLA of 99.5% (two and a half nines) means 2 full days of downtime per year, whereas Workspot has earned our customers’ confidence with an industry-leading 99.95%(three and a half nines) cloud desktop SLA. How much will the difference cost your business, and why settle for less than you need to?
Equally important to enterprises is a turnkey cloud VDI service that provides pro-active, real-time global monitoring and root-cause analysis to quickly identify when a problem arises, ascertain the impact, provide direction for the underlying cause, and send out alerts to the appropriate IT team members so they can take action. Workspot’s Customer Success team monitors all activity globally through our Network Operations Center, keeping IT teams firmly in control of their Workspot cloud VDI implementation, helping them keep users productive and the business running on all cylinders.
#3 Cloud Concern: Disruptive Change Management
Workspot’s Response: Embrace Existing IT Processes; Real-time User Monitoring & Analysis
The perception is that moving to the cloud means changing established IT policies and processes. However, just because your desktop computing resources move from being on-premises to cloud infrastructure does not necessarily equal disruption for your existing tools & processes. In fact, the right solution will support the tools and processes most IT teams typically use. Workspot’s turnkey cloud VDI service allows IT to manage all their virtual resources – apps, desktops & workstations – across cloud regions using their existing tools and processes, so there is no need for retraining or “dumbing down” your requirements. You want to adopt a turnkey cloud VDI service that uses your existing corporate image, integrates with Skype, Teams, GPOs, existing networks, security policies, and also uses AD & MFA. If your team uses SCCM, you should continue using it. If you use Intune to manage PC images, patches, and updates you should continue to use that also.
Evaluating the Options
Many legacy VDI vendors are offering cloud desktop solutions. The challenge decision-makers are faced with is drilling down on cloud VDI architectures to truly understand what is possible given their unique requirements. Workspot has partnered closely with Microsoft from day one, and we are the first and only turnkey, enterprise-customizable, global cloud VDI service on Azure. Our customers tell our story better than we ever could, “Workspot is giving us a competitive advantage.” This embodies what we do best: Provide a turnkey service for end-user computing that allows you to get back to doing what you do best; just leave the heavy lifting to us!
Ready to see how our turnkey cloud VDI service can work in your organization? Schedule a demo and let’s map your cloud desktop requirements to our capabilities.
