How to Build Business Resilience With Multi-Region Cloud Desktops

In today’s remote world, operating your business in the public cloud has become a de facto standard for organizations of all sizes. Jimmy Chang, chief product officer, Workspot, discusses how organizations have traditionally looked to the public cloud as a way to reduce IT complexity. And though organizations tend to have some measure of control over many potential problems, the risk of an entire public cloud region going down points to the multi-cloud approach for resilience. 

If you’re using a public cloud, you and your infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider share the responsibility of maintaining uptime. Since resilience is key, tools such as failover zones and VM shadows are typically made available by your cloud provider. These tools are helpful, but they don’t allow you to abrogate your responsibility. You need to thoroughly understand how to maintain high resilience, which is especially critical if you’re leveraging public cloud infrastructure for end-user computing. What do you need to know to understand it truly? Let’s get into it.   

The Challenge of Resilience

Organizations have tended to consider end-user computing (EUC) from the perspective that it largely is an on-premises workload. They have enabled EUC in one of two ways. The first is to use physical PCs and workstations. The second is to DIY a VDI solution and give the management to the organization’s IT team or a managed service provider (MSP).

Under normal circumstances, IT organizations attempt to prepare for any kind of outage to maintain their goal of zero downtime. This is an important facet of business continuity planning. But COVID-19 brought circumstances that were anything but normal. Within a very short time frame, there were suddenly many more remote workers for IT to deal with. Almost overnight, maintaining uptime and productivity became critical to business survival.

The sudden proliferation of remote workers led many organizations to expand their VPN use to support the immediate need to keep people productive. As the initial short-term shutdown extended to months, companies realized that they would need a longer-term option. Users complained about performance as VPNs were overburdened, and IT realized the security concerns involved with widespread, long-term VPN usage. On-premises VDI was another solution, but results were uneven, mostly when employees were physically remote from the datacenter, introducing latency and related performance issues. 

The public cloud quickly emerged as another option to enable remote workers long-term, with Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solutions offering a quick transition to managed cloud infrastructure. But there’s a hidden catch inherent in this solution: shifting your end-user computing and all other critical services into one cloud region merely transfers the risk to resilience from your on-prem location to one spot in the cloud. 

Learn More: Moving to the Cloud: 7 Workloads That Are Ready for Cloud Transition

Resilience by Regions

The most daunting resiliency concern most companies have about moving to the cloud is: what happens if the public cloud region where your virtual desktops reside goes down? It’s not an everyday occurrence, but it can and has happened. Just as companies plan for a variety of outage possibilities, they need to prepare for an outage in the public cloud region holding their desktop workloads.

If the cloud region where your cloud desktops live experiences an outage, your employees can’t work until the cloud region is back up. This is hard on all organizations, but it’s particularly hard for industries like financial services that rely on split-second transactions. Losing cloud access could cost them millions of dollars per hour – something to consider when calculating the ROI of various solutions.

With the goal of resilience top of mind, companies are beginning to pivot their strategy from a single cloud region to many. Resilience standards like Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) are typically measured in days. Look for cloud desktop solutions that make it possible to fall over to an alternate cloud region if your cloud region experiences downtime. This kind of failsafe results in an RPO of less than one day and an RTO measured in minutes. Some cloud desktop solutions also allow you to have cloud desktops on stand-by that your IT team can activate in just a few minutes if an outage occurs – a useful feature that can help IT leaders plan for situations when on-premises employees can’t reach their office due to natural or other disasters. 

Shifting to Multi-Cloud

To build in further resilience, organizations are choosing several cloud vendors. Each cloud provider offers different services and capabilities at very different price points, so many IT leaders seek out ‘best of breed’ services from multiple cloud providers. But managing multiple clouds requires the right technical skillsets and managing costs and usage from disparate environments can be complex. Look for solutions that can create an abstraction layer that allows you to span multiple clouds from a single console. For example, Azure Arc and Google Anthos are two cloud options that companies are using to more quickly realize a multi-cloud approach and lessen the burden on their IT teams. 

As noted previously, using this approach to disperse cloud desktop deployments yields better resilience, RTO and RPO than on-premises approaches. However, virtual desktop solutions can be challenging to manage, and your IT team likely doesn’t need greater complexity. Fortunately, there are now desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) platforms that defend against regional cloud outages by enabling automated backup and automated failover to an alternate cloud region. 

Offerings that centralize management into a single console that can provide an abstraction layer to hide the underlying cloud complexity will greatly simplify multi-cloud deployments. Using multiple consoles makes it much more difficult to stay on top of the global user experience and quickly address issues that may come up. Simplified management of this kind isn’t possible from cloud offerings of legacy VDI. Even with the broker hosted in the cloud, the underlying architecture isn’t able to support centralized management of global deployments.

Learn More: 10 In-Demand Cloud Admin Skills You Should Master in 2021

The Multi-Cloud Advantage

When the pandemic-mandated lockdown happened, it created an “adapt or perish” moment for businesses worldwide. Many of them found out the hard way that their remote desktop solutions were not up to the task; security, scaling and latency issues resulted. Cloud desktops seem like a great solution, but the specter of their cloud region having an outage looms large. Because resilience is critical to the business, the safer bet is to use a multi-region or multi-cloud DaaS model. As added benefits, your IT team has less complexity to manage and better desktop SLA. 

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