Tuesday, March 19, 2024

march, 2024

Scaling Your Current Virtual or Remote Desktop Environments to Accommodate Work From Home

Currently, many organizations are being faced with a huge IT challenge of provisioning their systems to employees now required to work from home (WFH) With the Desktop as a Service (DaaS) market expected to grow considerably in the coming decade – particularly now that Microsoft has joined the ‘party’ with Windows Virtual Desktop – organizations should include DaaS as part of their overall IT strategy. As many organizations already have a “cloud first” strategy from a server/data center perspective, including the feasibility of moving desktops to the cloud should be addressed.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has its place in an overall desktop strategy but a recent Gartner Market Direction Report* states that by “2023, price reductions and product maturity will lead organizations to move 20% of VDI users into DaaS offerings in the cloud.” In the same report Gartner believes “DaaS is poised to cannibalize on-premises VDI when the infrastructure is due for refresh.”

With this in mind, what workloads are best suited to being moved to the cloud? As with any IT strategy, it does depend on applications, users, business criticality, etc. so is a little bit like asking how long is a piece of string? What I recommend to customers I talk with is to first discover what you have and learn how it is being used and by whom – because you can’t manage what you don’t know you have! There are a variety of a software assessment management (SAM) tools in the market, but you need to know far more than just what applications are running. With any migration – whether it is an OS upgrade, a digital transformation or desktop refresh – you should do the following:

  • Have visibility across all users, machines and applications in your environment
  • Define and leverage a user-centric performance metric for performance validation and optimization and thus determine success of the migration
  • Use user experience metrics to determine “normal” and baseline before on-boarding users to the new platform

Until you have this insight, only then can you – or should you – consider a transformation to the cloud.

Next, you should consider automating a path for user data to a central storage point such as a private or public cloud. You should design your new cloud desktops to be able to easily access this location so users can have a seamless transition on day zero. By following such a practice you are, in effect, staging your users’ data in the cloud to ensure your next desktops are readily adopted and users are productive in the new environment.

So, why should you look to ‘cloud stage’ your environment? Just like on-prem virtual desktops, not every desktop and user will immediately be a good candidate for a cloud-hosted desktop. Even if you are using a reliable, distributed physical desktop model, you can use the latest cloud technologies to ease your desktop transformations to the platform. As centralized cloud storage has matured, you can take advantage of major players such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to make even physical desktop transformations seamless.

Cloud Staging is a strategy that leverages centralized cloud-based storage as a staging area to transform desktops. A Cloud Staging strategy can enable an organization to co-exist desktop types or lift and shift users to an entirely new desktop platform.  Important user-centric data – such as applications, user authored data, and user profiles – are seamlessly synched and hosted on cloud storage, while users remain productive and ready to logon to their new desktop as soon as required.

Here are the most important items you’ll want to make sure you stage and some of the significant challenges you’ll face:

  • Application staging: to stage user applications you’ll need a virtual or layered application delivery solution that supports cloud-hosted applications. Ideally it will support object-based storage solutions (Microsoft Azure Blob, Amazon S3, Google Cloud) so you won’t have to manage file shares and infrastructure in the cloud.
  • User profile staging: User profiles should also support object-based storage and they should also support the profile format you are going to. For instance, if you have an old version of Windows 10 then you need to make sure profiles version changes to a later version will not break your profile staging plans.
  • User authored data staging: to stage user authored data you’ll need a solution that supports a background sync to file areas where cloud storage services can be leveraged. You’ll want to make sure the solution is compatible with Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon WorkDocs, DropBox and other leading vendors.
  • Monitor the user experience and progress: The last thing you want to do is hamper user productivity so you’ll want to monitor the user experience between desktop platforms so you can prove which desktop is the better quality desktop. You’ll also want to monitor the progress of data synchronization to cloud.

Finally, in the current situation of a global pandemic, working from home is now prevalent. Much of the guidance above is also relevant to enabling your employees to work from home. While many will have access to their corporate network via a VPN, many will be faced, for the first time, of setting up their corporate desktop remotely. Another facet to working from home that is not a user criteria but a management criteria; how to monitor your employees are actually working.

My guidance, whatever workspace model you are looking to deploy, is to assess the current environment, utilize a cloud staging strategy to migrate one step at a time, and then continually monitor the user experience of the new environment. If your users are happy then your IT help desk will be happy!

Liquidware

* Market Guide for Desktop as a Service, published 6 November 2019, ID G00368228, authors Michael Silver, Nathan Hill
Jason E. Smith
Jason E. Smith
VP Product Marketing, Liquidware

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