This panel of experts from Microsoft Azure, BIM consulting firm Microdesk, multidisciplinary engineering firm Barge Design and Workspot come together to share the lessons learned from this cloud desktop and workstation implementation across the Southeast U.S. To support new growth objectives for the firm and control costs, the Barge IT team began exploring alternate end-user computing solutions. The team explored traditional VDI, but solution complexity was an early show stopper.

David Ferguson of Barge Design was deeply involved in the strategic, cloud-first decision to move away from traditional on-premises servers, storage and big workstations and replace them with cloud desktops, cloud workstations and cloud storage. Barge has hundreds of employees working remotely across nine states. Today they deploy lightweight, inexpensive laptops with dual monitors to their employees, who connect in over home networks to their GPU-accelerated cloud workstations and securely access data centralized in Microsoft Azure. Collaboration is key, and now project teams consult in real time, with everyone accessing a common data environment.

Getting the most difficult workload right – graphics-intensive applications – changes everything for valuable CAD experts whose Workspot cloud workstations free them from the confines of the office, enabling them to be productive no matter where they are working. If power users love the performance, consider how knowledge and task workers will also benefit from a low-latency experience that drives productivity!