How to Maximize Business Resilience with Cloud Desktops
End-user downtime is a serious issue that can have a significant impact on your business. One Workspot customer told us it cost them a million dollars a day in lost productivity when their legacy VDI solution failed. Talk about having a bad day! That’s what brought them to Workspot, and improving business resilience is a primary reason they and many other organizations look to the public cloud for end user computing.
Unexpected Threats Just Happen
If the constant onslaught of malware and ransomware attacks wasn’t overwhelming enough for IT teams, COVID 19 sealed your fate for more sleepless nights. It’s dire enough to respond to an acute situation that causes downtime, whether from a security breach or a weather event, but it’s quite another level of tech dread to send the entire workforce home to work for an extended period of time. Some IT teams fared better than others; those relying strictly on physical desktops had a painful situation on their hands because they had to procure and implement the technology to support remote working, none of which happens quickly – even if the piece-parts are all available. Those already using virtual desktops could at least have a portion of their workforce productive from home quickly, although scaling up on-premises VDI to cover the rest of the workforce isn’t easy and doesn’t happen fast either.
That the pandemic has been an eye-opener about business resilience (or the lack thereof) is probably the understatement of the year. IT teams found that the existing playbooks for avoiding business disruption no longer applied. The good news is that all of this discomfort is driving IT teams to completely rethink their end user computing infrastructure in the glaring light of resiliency and business continuity strategy.
Getting to a Long-Term Solution
A VPN is one approach to addressing the sudden shift to remote work, but many organizations have encountered performance bottlenecks and security concerns. With the prospect that supporting remote work is likely a long-term necessity, the VPN option comes with too many security risks and productivity barriers. Other companies expanded their use of on-premises VDI with varying degrees of success, but long-term these solutions are too rigid for a future that requires the flexibility to be ready for anything and to be able to respond immediately to everything from changing business opportunities to existential threats. Many companies are looking to the cloud as a long-term solution to support a flexible “work from anywhere” strategy going forward, which we believe to be the right move. However, if you just move all your critical services, including end-user computing, into a single cloud region, then you have simply moved the outage risk from your on-premises infrastructure to a single cloud infrastructure. While probably more immune to outages than on-premises infrastructure, there is still risk to take into account. So, what’s the right way to mitigate that risk?
How to Design EUC for Resilience
With the right cloud desktop solution, there should be a continuum of capabilities to address the different types of BC/DR requirements organizations have. Workspot has invented innovative business continuity solutions that make our Enterprise Desktop Cloud uniquely suited for meeting enterprise resiliency requirements. Need to recover from a weather event in which people can’t reach their office PCs? One-click by your IT team activates your arsenal of “stand-by” cloud desktops which people access from any device remotely – so they can get back to work once they are safe. That’s one option, and it takes your RTO from hours or days to just minutes.
Additionally, you can take BC a step further to protect against a cloud region outage that while unusual, can and does happen. If you have a cloud desktop solution that resides in one cloud region, and that region goes down, your users can’t access their cloud desktops, and that can have devastating consequences for your business. The cost of that kind of outage must be considered as you evaluate the ROI of solution options. Workspot enables your cloud desktops to fail-over to an alternate cloud region so in the event that your primary region goes down, everyone’s cloud desktop is ready-to-go in another cloud region, so people just keep working without missing a beat.
As CIOs guide their cloud strategies, they can’t ignore the possibility of a provider-wide outage. Requiring a multi-cloud strategy means the organization won’t be overly reliant on a single provider. Cloud desktops can be deployed across multiple public cloud providers today; the catch is whether or not this cross-cloud implementation can be managed from a single admin console. If not, managing a global cloud desktop implementation is going to be nearly impossible. If so, you have the opportunity to dramatically simplify IT processes and you will have gained the ability to align the goal of flexible end-user computing with broader organizational goals for resilience. That’s where Workspot can take you.
Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo and let’s talk about your EUC resiliency goals. We’ll also show you how our cloud desktop platform works!
