It’s Time to Move On From Legacy VDI
Over the years we’ve heard the same complaints from IT leaders in enterprises using legacy VDI:
- It takes months, sometimes years, to roll out production VDI
- It’s too complex and the day to day effort involved in maintaining VDI is not sustainable
- Patching and upgrading the VDI solution results in too much downtime
- Users are very unhappy about the performance of their virtual desktops
- Scaling the system is incredibly challenging – new infrastructure, multiple farms – and it takes too long
These issues can be blamed squarely on legacy VDI architectures, yet those outdated architectures are still the core of most virtual desktop solutions today – whether cloud-hosted or on-premises. Legacy VDI architectures were simply not designed for the cloud era, and it shows. The same, old architecture is going to produce the same, old issues. There’s no magic that will make an old architecture new. Its limitations are inherent to its design.
That’s why Workspot invented a completely new architecture for the cloud era – the Cloud Desktop Fabric. The Cloud Desktop Fabric is the cloud-native platform for our turnkey cloud desktop service; it’s enterprise-proven and it changes the game entirely for IT teams. In a previous blog, we examined the five major approaches to virtual desktops and the architectural characteristics of each. It’s vitally important that IT decision-makers understand the various architectures, the capabilities they enable, and how the architecture of each approach defines the use cases the system will support. It’s the only way you’ll end up with the right solution and avoid unpleasant surprises because the architecture determines the cloud VDI benefits you can achieve. In this blog, I’ll discuss in more depth the capabilities that make Workspot different than any other virtual desktop solution and why that’s important for enterprise IT and business growth. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key benefits of Workspot’s Cloud Desktop Fabric.
Simplicity, Without Compromise
Simplicity is really the hallmark of what we achieve for our customers. Our customers tell us that we have enabled them to move Workspot management to Level 1 IT resources and folks who understand Windows vs. Level 2 or Level 3 resources that are needed to manage legacy VDI solutions. Customers who have migrated from legacy VDI tell us that their help desk tickets have gone down 75% after implementing Workspot. This cloud VDI benefit not only simplifies your IT organization, but it also reduces operational costs.
How do we make it simple for you? First, we run a cloud desktop service for you. Your desktops and workstations are delivered from any Microsoft Azure cloud region worldwide. We do all the heavy lifting, from initial deployment to maintenance and upgrades, to fast and simple scalability. You don’t have to manage infrastructure anymore. You can reduce your on-prem data center, and when you do, you don’t have to trade security or performance.
But often simplicity comes with compromise. Most cloud desktop solutions give you a vanilla desktop – you get a basic Windows image, and you have to install your own applications, use their tools to manage apps, and use their MFA solution. And most solutions don’t even let you run Windows 10; they run Windows Server.
With Workspot, you don’t have to make any compromises. You can use your own corporate Windows 10 image, manage it with your corporate tools, and use your corporate security policies and MFA. And all of this, anywhere in the world, from a single pane of glass. No other solution can do this!
From a single pane of glass, you can deploy:
- Your corporate Windows 10 image to any cloud region in the world
- With your corporate apps
- With your corporate authorization (Okta, Azure AD, etc…)
- With your corporate security policies
- Using your corporate management tools (SCCM, Intune)
Performance That Keeps End Users Happy And Productive
Latency has been the bane of on-premises virtual desktops since day one. Any user unlucky enough to be remote from the data center is going to experience latency that can often be untenable. Latency limits productivity and makes people unhappy.
Workspot changes all that. Because of the way we designed the Cloud Desktop Fabric, you can locate your end-users’ desktops within the cloud regions nearest them. This typically places them within 50ms of their desktop, and that’s latency they won’t even notice. Even power users who rely on CAD applications for their work are astonished when they see performance from their Workspot cloud workstations that’s as good as or better than their physical workstation. So, cloud desktop proximity is key, plus all your data center traffic flows through a high-performance cloud backbone.
This kind of performance has never before been possible with virtual desktops. We call it “the new math of VDI performance,” and you can read more about it here.
Business SLA is More Than Just Desktop Availability
We understand how stretched IT resources are, and how everyone needs to accomplish more with less. Provisioning and maintaining physical PCs and workstations, and managing the complexity that comes with legacy VDI is not a good use of IT resources. Workspot and Azure can do it better. The CIOs and other IT leaders we talk with are looking for ways to shift the responsibility for the desktop SLA – with good reason. Workspot takes over that responsibility, with an industry-leading 99.95% SLA for our cloud desktops. But there’s more to the picture than meets the eye.
Our mission is to drive the best business SLA for our customers. Business SLA is more than just cloud desktop availability. There are many factors that keep your business secure, productive, and agile. Workspot’s pro-active, real-time root cause and blast radius analysis helps IT quickly identify issues – even those that go beyond Workspot’s platform – understand their impact and scope, and gain insight for fast resolution.
Data is the lifeblood of delivering stellar service levels. Because we have instrumented so many of the systems involved in delivering our cloud desktop service, we have near real-time data that gives us a comprehensive picture of what end-users are experiencing. We collect access data from the end-user client, their desktop agent, Workspot Control, and the public cloud infrastructure.
Details about access and performance enable us to help IT teams stay in front of potential problems – think of it as an early warning system. Is the network in the user’s location the issue? Or is there an issue with the public cloud region?
Global Visibility At-A-Glance
Our Cloud Desktop Fabric is designed so IT teams can provision, manage, scale and analyze all of their cloud desktops, all over the world, from a single pane of glass. Most enterprise organizations have a global presence; your cloud desktop solution should too. With Workspot, not only can you quickly respond to business needs by spinning up additional cloud desktops and workstations, but you’ll have a comprehensive view, across Azure regions, of your entire deployment. No other solution provides a single, global view of your entire implementation because legacy architectures don’t allow it.
Additionally, all of the data you’re collecting from user devices across the globe can be fed into Splunk, providing you with a comprehensive data set with even greater analytical capabilities, especially when it comes to mitigating security risk.
Self-Service Elasticity
Provisioning a physical PC for a new user can take weeks when you consider sourcing, imaging, and shipping, and we won’t even get into the problem of keeping all those PC’s patched and secure.
Virtual desktop scalability has always been a major challenge for IT teams; adding users to on-premises VDI takes too much time and effort.
If your organization is constantly changing, whether you’re hiring new employees, or bringing in contractors who work remotely, you need them to become productive quickly. One of the most compelling benefits of the Cloud Desktop Fabric is the agility to onboard a new user in any geography using the integration with ITSM systems such as ServiceNow. For example, a contract developer in India can simply choose their desktop from the organization’s ServiceNow service catalog. The ServiceNow application will then invoke Workspot APIs to provision the selected cloud desktop in a cloud region in India.
We have enterprise customers doing this today; their users gain access to the optimal cloud desktop in minutes. Meanwhile, your IT people can work on projects that are more strategic to your business. It’s a major cloud VDI benefit you can achieve today.
Choose a Modern Architecture for Cloud Desktop Success
To stay competitive, enterprises need to be ready for anything; outdated technology will inevitably slow you down. The Workspot Cloud Desktop Fabric is a massive innovation for desktop computing in the cloud era. When your organization has the agility to respond to business dynamics on-demand, the possibilities for your organization’s growth are really exciting. We’d love to show you how it works – just schedule a demo.
