Over the past few weeks! there has been a tremendous surge in customers accessing the Remote access solutions! In this blog we will discuss as to why Windows Virtual desktop has become a GO-TO strategy for many businesses. The key factors driving organizations to adopt to Windows Virtual Desktop to rapidly provide access to their employees during this Pandemic situation.

And we have this joke trending all over the place:

“Question: Who Drove the IT transformation in your business?

Answer: Covid19″

Although quite funny! this has become a cold truth about driving digital transformation. Remote access has become the need of the hour. Work from home has become the way that every organization today is delivering their services to their customers and / or their own end users for that matter.

In the last week we saw Microsoft announcing that there has been a 750% surge in the Azure usage in their European sites alone. That is a 7.5 fold growth in usage. With over 3 billion people affected due to lockdown! The pandemic has not left any city untouched!

Now! Let us get to the bottom of it! the reason why we think Microsoft’s Windows virtual desktop has become the topic of the hour with majority of the organizations!

Primary Factors:

• Rapid Deployment!: WVD can be rapidly deployed using powershell and be able to scale up and scale down as required! There are a lot of customizations available along with a whole bunch of automation / code repositories in Git that will help your organization adopt to it swiftly.
• O365:Microsoft has strategically placed WVD right there with O365 services! Essentially any customer that owns an O365 tenant is already using Microsoft’s Azure services. That just means that you are already essentially present with an Azure subscription.
• Azure AD as a Pre-Requisite: WVD requires Azure-AD setup, Azure-AD is used for Authentication on the rdweb portal. This ties up to the previous point, if you have O365 in your organization, then this pre-requisite is already met.
• Licensing: This is where WVD absolutely stands out! Basically, what Microsoft is saying is, if you have any of these licenses below you are basically entitled to run WVD without having to pay any additional licensing cost! All you need to pay for is just the IAAS compute costs on Azure!

• Windows 10 Multi-Session Support: This is a unique offering with WVD where in, you are able to leverage all the good things about a Windows 10 desktop operating system, and use it as if it was a Remote Desktop Session Host Server with Multiple users connecting to it. There by, you have your users experience a shared windows 10 desktop experience.
• HTML5 Access: Essentially what this means is that your organization is able to leverage a browser-based access to the WVD applications and desktops. Which in-turn translates to be able to provide access to your employees from any device. All they need is an Internet Browser! How cool is that?
• FSLogix: Although not something that is unique to WVD! But with a combination of FSLogix with WVD, we can provide a seamless dedicated desktop experience on a shared infrastructure, without hampering end user experience. FSLogix also brings in capabilities for faster logons, Outlook caching and such.
• Only Cloud Solution: Considering the pandemic situation this is one of the most important factors. WVD is what we call a Tech Born in cloud.
• Hardware unavailability: Given the current situation, if an organization is trying to expand their local data center footprint to be used for their native VDI support, lack of hardware availability is driving customers to look for cloud based solutions. Since Azure is the primary candidate for it, why not look at WVD as the solution.
• BYOD: Like any other VDI solution. WVD highly encourages BYOD scenarios. Especially with current situation BYOD is a key factor for organizations allowing their employees working remotely.

However! A question remains as to whether these factors would continue to drive growth of interest from organizations for WVD? or if this is just an interim solution until the Pandemic situation is evaded. Since WVD lacks a lot of features that solutions from key players like Citrix, VMware and such bring to the table with their Advanced protocols and advanced controls on the infrastructure.

If you have a question about WVD while your organization is planning to adopt to it. You may reach our to us, We will be happy to help you drive the transformation using WVD.

– V-Desktops

vdesktops@gmail.com