ProArch CTO Ben Wilcox, Rimo3 CTO Samit Halvadia, and Nerdio CTO Vadim Vladimirskiy came together to discuss how virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is helping CIOs successfully adapt to a remote work environment while maintaining security and keeping costs manageable in our recent webinar, “Why CIOs are Adopting Virtual Desktop.”
Keep reading for a recap of the panelists insight and watch the full recording here.
Why are organizations migrating workloads to a virtual desktop infrastructure solution like Azure Virtual Desktop?
Remote Work
Thanks to the pandemic, companies have had to adjust to remote work. Some have committed to staying remote, while others have introduced hybrid schedules where employees work from home and from the office. As Vladimirskiy put it, “Employees need to be able to work from anywhere, at any time, and from any device.” Virtual desktops make this happen by creating a virtual workspace that can be securely accessed by work-from-home, hybrid, and office employees.
Cost
Cost is another factor causing organizations to migrate to VDIs like Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). AVD’s cost is usage-based, which means businesses only pay when the service is being used. This prevents ballooning costs of a VDI that may not get used to the degree that the business is paying for.
Accessibility
In years past, a VDI was almost exclusively an enterprise solution. Businesses had to consider the costs associated with the hardware required to set up VDIs. Currently, businesses from car dealerships to grocery stores and medical offices are all using VDIs, such as Azure Virtual Desktop. Cloud-based infrastructure makes it incredibly easy to set up new environments and add users during new-employee onboarding.
What are common obstacles during a workload and app migration? How can Rimo3 help organizations overcome them?
User Segmentation and Experience
A successful migration means providing the correct desktop experience to the correct user. One of the biggest migration failures occurs when the end user’s experience is affected for the worse. Dedicated planning at the beginning of the migration process ensures a positive outcome.
Application Segmentation
Not every application will work properly when migrated to a virtual desktop infrastructure. Testing needs to be done to make sure each application works as expected. With hundreds of applications across multiple virtual environments, manual testing is time-consuming, expensive, and inefficient.
“Without automation . . . [migration] can feel like an insurmountable task,” Halvadia said during the webinar. Rimo3 offers automated predeployment testing that greatly decreases the time your migration takes.
How is Nerdio utilized in the orchestration and management of the AVD environment?
Nerdio is a management overlay that plugs into the management experience of Azure Virtual Desktop. It extends the management experience with enterprise features to manage large deployments.
Nerdio helps with cost optimization as well, with customers reporting savings of 50–75 percent. Nerdio can optimize based on user activity or anticipated user activity, which allows more to be done with fewer resources. In short, Nerdio unifies admin management, making managers’ jobs easier.
Why is now the time for Desktop as a Service?
CIOs need to be thinking about their long-term strategy for supporting a hybrid and remote model. Skill and resource scarcity makes traditional on-premises VDI deployments increasingly difficult to execute and manage—not to mention the financial investment. Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a cloud-based VDI that utilizes the infrastructure from a public cloud and a set of services from an outsourced IT partner to deliver a modern desktop experience to the end user.
With a DaaS model, you get a team like ProArch—who has the expertise to assess workloads, migrate, and maintain the virtual desktop environment—plus tools like Rimo3 and Nerdio to streamline migration and management. “We like to plug into an existing team,” said Ben Wilcox. “ProArch can offer fully managed or partially managed services to fit your needs.”
For more insight, download the full recording and slide deck of the webinar and learn more about Desktop as a Service.