A lot of business across the world have been thrown in to massive work-from-home experiments due to the covid-19 pandemic. For most, staff productivity has dipped and IT support requests skyrocketed. Riptide can work with you towards designing an enterprise work-from-home IT strategy that will ensure employees remain productive and have the same desktop & applications experience whether they sit in the office, home network or are working from a plane on the other end of the world!
- Are your remote workers struggling to securely reach enterprise apps while working from home or when travelling? Are they able to work securely from their device of choice?
- Are you losing money because your remote workers cant work efficiently on the current remote access solution provided either due to home bandwidth requirements, frequent disconnects or other such issues.
- Are VPNs & terminal services proving too inefficient, unreliable and impossible to manage? Have you managed to standardize the experience you are offering to all remote workers regardless of where they are? Is your IT support team overwhelmed with end user support issues?
- Is data security a key concern – are you worried that VPN sessions and other solutions involve remote workers copying out data from the enterprise network to unregulated BYOD devices at home?
- Are you suppliers, agents etc. introducing security risks when they onboard the corporate network with non-compliant endpoints?
PC based desktop computing continues to prove unsustainable for a huge number of organisations across all sectors.
More and more technology suppliers are being asked by their customers to come up with a more viable alternative that can help them meet the changing needs of an everchanging working environment whilst ensuring that the solution is both manageable and cost effective.
Virtualization of the desktop (in all its forms) offers a compelling alternative to more traditional environments and is recognised as a rapidly accelerating trend worldwide. Flexibility, mobility, security and improved manageability are all mandatory requirements for desktop environments going forward and virtualization offers the opportunity for these to become a reality and revolutionize the way business and institutions operate.
With VDI, a virtual desktop is isolated from the client device and runs in a Virtual Machine (VM) maintained in a data center. A VDI user interacts with a virtual desktop using one or more end point devices – the device can be a thin client, Zero client, tablet, phone, laptop or desktop. Similar to session-based remote desktops (formerly known as Terminal Services), VDI provides a session with a full-fidelity desktop environment that is virtualized within a server-based hypervisor.
In a VDI deployment, there are two models: (1) a persistent virtual desktop and (2) a dynamic or non-persistent one.
With a persistent desktop there is a one-to-one mapping of VMs to users. Each user is assigned with a designated VM. Since VMs are commonly stored on a Storage Area Network (SAN) array, a larger number of users will likely lead to significant SAN requirements, increasing the cost of a solution.
Non-persistent desktops use a golden image (or images) to provide disposable desktops for users. All user personalization, profile, applications, etc. are stored separately from the desktop. When a user requests a desktop, a VM is selected from the relevant desktop pool and is combined with the user’s personal data and applications for delivery to the user. It simplifies the overall management by reducing the number of desktop images maintained and reduces the storage hardware requirement.
Advantages offered by Desktop Virtualization
- Simplified desktop provisioning (template based virtual machine creation)
- Longer client hardware refresh periods (MTBF on Thin Clients far exceeds that of a PC)
- Increased reliability at each layer through redundant components / equipment
- Improved user experience / performance
- Data security and retention improved – centralize all corporate data securely ion your datacenter.
- Hot-desk ability: move around your environment, your apps & desktops will follow you wherever you go.