Biggest Technology Mistakes During the Rush to Remote Work (Plus How to Avoid Them)

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How to Embrace True, Multicloud Flexibility in VDI Deployments

Amid the rush to remote work, IT teams were pressured to oversee large-scale remote work deployments. As enterprises become more distributed, see how adopting a truly hybrid and multicloud solution can help meet virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementation challenges, keep up with growing resource demands, and simplify infrastructure deployment. 

There has been a seismic shift in the way that people work. Instead of open-plan offices and weekly happy-hours, 2020 has been a year defined by masks, stay-at-home orders and newly converted home offices.

While there have always been people who worked outside of the office or at home, that was the exception. IT teams were able to address their needs on a case-by-case basis. Almost overnight, however, IT teams had to provide remote-work solutions for entire organizations.

The rush to work-from-home meant that solutions needed to be fast and easy to deploy, and business leaders made decisions that allowed them to keep their organizations running. Now that it’s clear that we’re not going back to the office  anytime soon, businesses must carefully assess their short-term solutions to ensure that they are the best option for the long haul, and that they are prepared for any future large scale disruption.

Reliance on Desktop Virtualization Soars During Pandemic  

For the IT team and the business, this transformation had to happen in parallel to ensure the security of the data passing between the user working from home and the corporate IT system sitting behind its firewalls back at base, which had to remain uncompromised.

Faced with this situation, many companies simply expanded existing infrastructure and delivery processes to produce the results they needed as quickly as their users demanded, sometimes in a few hours or days due to a remote work mandate. The result, at times, was a technological band-aid. In some cases these solutions failed to address larger problems like security, scalability, and cost in a sustainable manner. The other challenge with this approach is that the band-aid solution may not align with the organization’s larger cloud vision and strategy.

Other organizations used desktop and application virtualization as a way to enable the move to large-scale remote work. This approach has the advantage that staff can log in to their virtual desktop from anywhere with an internet connection. This process was more secure because virtual desktops store data in a central data center, and IT teams can easily upgrade and patch virtual desktops remotely. Employees working from home can access their virtual desktop from a PC or tablet, and if their home PC breaks, they can still access their virtual desktop from any other device they have. Citrix is probably the best-known name in providing digital workspace solutions, with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD), formerly XenApp and XenDesktop, and more recently with the introduction of Citrix Cloud (Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service).

VDI Deployment Hurdles Remain  

While desktop virtualization may be a good solution for the remote work challenges that organizations are facing, IT users are finding that there are some negative aspects that cannot be ignored. For instance, unreliable VDIOpens a new window and End User ComputingOpens a new window (EUC) services can lead to business unit (BU) and end-user complaints that take time to deal with. Integration and the delivery of  business services can be slow due to technical debt and legacy apps. Tech debt reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution for immediate application, instead of using a better approach that would take longer. 

And there’s always the issue of access to adequately  trained staff to deploy and manage the EUC environment. In effect, it can be complex and time-consuming to deploy, manage, and troubleshoot virtual apps and desktops, with the result that the end user experience is adversely affected at scale, resulting in large numbers of help desk calls. And the more vendors involved, the harder it becomes to manage.

More and more businesses are addressing these issues by moving to cloud computingOpens a new window , and using  Desktop as a ServiceOpens a new window (DaaS) as an alternative to on-prem management of the control plane with VDI. With DaaS, the virtualized desktops, applications and management of the environment move to the cloud, where the environment is hosted in the cloud by a provider responsible for the hardware and the software. DaaS systems are typically offered on a subscription basis (again, another industry trend) and invoiced per usage, per seat. This gives organizations greater flexibility in how much of the service they need to purchase, and makes it easier and faster to scale up or down. Using a DaaS provider can eliminate many administrative tasks associated with managing EUC environments, including provisioning, deploying, maintaining, and recycling desktops. 

As with a VDI solution, DaaS eliminates the need to supply corporate devices to staff working from home, because it provides on-demand access to cloud desktops that provide the compute, memory, and storage resources needed. 

As compared to a traditional solution of providing a laptop and a VPN connection, DaaS provides greater access to secure, enterprise-grade application solutions that meet compliance and security requirements.  

Reduce Cloud Lock-In & Scale at Your Own Pace  

There’s no need to choose between these solutions, though. Above all, organizations must make sure that the solutions they select meet the full spectrum of their business needs, including:

• Avoiding workload rearchitecting and cloud lock-in
• Meeting data sovereignty and compliance obligations while providing coverage, redundancy, and on-demand incremental capacity
• Providing operational flexibility across the private and public infrastructure to support a distributed workforce
• Securing and maintaining responsive access to applications, desktops, and data on any device, anywhere, and at any scale
• Accessing true multi-cloud flexibility, so users can choose the environment that works for them, whether that’s on-prem, public cloud, or both
• Providing software with the same operational ease of use and efficiency, whether working on-prem or in the cloud
• Easily, quickly, and efficiently moving workloads over to the cloud without refactoring the applications, changing security policies, or conducting other operational procedures

How to Scale VDI Rollouts Faster in the Multi-Cloud Era  

What’s needed is a flexible solution. Businesses should be able to quickly scale workload capacity to accommodate temporary or permanent demand, and be able to expand into different geographical regions in minutes. The solution should be able to leverage public clouds for high availability and disaster recovery, without the complexity of managing a secondary data center or a stand-alone recovery solution sitting idle the majority of the time. It should be easy to migrate workloads between on-premises and cloud to suit business needs and capacity constraints. 

This flexibility also addresses challenges around data sovereignty, compliance, and regional certifications (such as GDPR, CPAA, HIPAA, and SOX). The solution should provide a way to reduce infrastructure costs by moving Test/Dev to an on-demand operations and operational expense (OpEx) model. 

This sort of cloud strategy maximizes results by performing tests at production scale instead of using costly, dedicated resources on-premises. And the solution should save money by requiring organizations to pay only for what they use when they need it. One example of such a hybridOpens a new window and multi-cloudOpens a new window solution that helps address the entire spectrum of business needs is Nutanix Clusters with Citrix CloudOpens a new window . Nutanix Clusters offer consistent experience between the on-premises and public cloud environments, and offer simplified operations through utilization of the existing plugin architecture with no modifications.  The benefits of this simplicity are evident in the fact that Clusters, which has been validated as Citrix ReadyOpens a new window , allows you to burst 2,000 Citrix Desktops to AWS in under two hoursOpens a new window , which is ideal if you need to expand your existing Citrix deployment quickly. The joint solutionOpens a new window enables customers to have the same capabilities and experience in the cloud as they would in their own data centers.

Hybrid Cloud Powers Digital Workspaces When and Where You Need Them 

The rush and urgency of moving staff to work from home is now behind us and virtual, distributed workforces are likely to be the norm for the foreseeable future.  Whether your use-case is scale at speed, business continuity, hassle-free lift-and-shift of Citrix virtual apps and desktop deployments, or efficient migrations between cloud and on-prem deployments, a true hybrid cloud may be the best path forward.  If you are looking to deploy infrastructure for Citrix workloads in the cloud quickly, now is the time to invest in sustainable solutions that are flexible enough to accommodate your broader cloud strategy both today and tomorrow.