Making VDI More Capable Than a Physical Desktop
Discover how modern connection brokers revolutionize remote work productivity.
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Karen Gondoly, CEO of Leostream, delves into VDI’s transformative impact on remote work, which surpasses conventional desktop arrangements. As remote work gains momentum, businesses seek resilient, adaptable, and affordable solutions.
The rise of remote work means employers can hire the best employees, no matter where they are located. However, maximizing remote productivity requires careful investment and planning to achieve resiliency and flexibility without sacrificing affordability. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has long been a core technology for remote work. Still, modern hybrid cloud technologies make well-designed VDI infrastructures more capable than the physical desktops they replace.
Modern large organizations have a diverse and geographically distributed workforce, and the technology needs of that workforce are equally diverse. A contingent customer support worker will not have the same desktop computer requirements as a 3D animator, and for many people, their technology requirements will change depending on the specific project they are working on.
Traditionally, these technology needs would be met by sizing each person’s desktop – whether physical or virtual – to handle the most demanding task that person is likely to need to do. People would be matched 1:1 with a desktop, and they would use that same desktop – or an identical desktop from the same pool – every day, regardless of the needs of their individual project.
VDI connection brokers offer an alternative desktop provisioning and management approach by allowing desktop infrastructures to be provisioned dynamically. Instead of connecting directly to a desktop, you communicate with the connection broker, and the connection broker determines and connects you to the appropriate desktop. People can be matched to a desktop environment based on any number of different factors, and this approach benefits organizations by providing increased flexibility, resiliency, and information security, all while easing the support burden on IT teams.
Unified Management and User Experience
Connection brokers, in general and in some cases specifically, allow us to get as close to the ideal of “always use the right tool for the job” as it is possible to get in the End User Computing (EUC) world because they solve the twin problems of assigning the right tool to the right person as well as making it simple to support that person when they have trouble with the tool. Larger organizations with diverse workforce needs and geographic distributions can benefit more from this approach, as they tend to have a wider diversity of desktop environments to support.
The diversity of desktop environments needing support tends to be especially true for organizations experiencing frequent mergers and acquisitions. It takes time to integrate IT systems, with information security, support, and licensing considerations often posing considerable challenges. Connection brokers offer a way to interpose a standard baseline of information security to all remote connectivity, ensuring that workers get connected to the desktop environments they need, and do this regardless of where either the people or the desktop environments physically happen to be in the world.
Different vendors support various connection protocols such as RDP (remote desktop protocol), VNC (virtual network computing), NoMachine, PCoIP (PC over IP), SSH (secure shell), or others and can even deliver VDI over HTML5. This means they can enable access to Windows, Linux, and MacOS desktop environments, all from the same interface. They provide centralized management of users, resources, and policies, regardless of the underlying infrastructure, radically simplifying support costs while allowing organizations to choose more cost-efficient infrastructure providers as needed.
Infrastructure Diversity
Just listing the number of different hosting infrastructures and authentication providers explains to some extent why connection brokers need to exist in the modern IT landscape:
Virtual infrastructures:
- VMware vSphere/ESXi
- Microsoft Hyper-V
- Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)
- Nutanix AHV
- Scale Computing
- Verge.io
Cloud providers:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 instances and Amazon WorkSpaces
- Microsoft Azure (VMs and Windows 365)
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP) compute instance-based virtual desktops
Physical desktop options:
- Workstations running Windows, Linux, or MacOS
- Blade PCs and Workstations
Authentication providers:
- Active Directory and LDAP
- SAML 2.0-capable Single Sign-On
- Two-Factor/Multi-Factor Authentication (via either RADIUS or Duo Security)
- Smart Cards and Public Key Infrastructure Certificates:
- Local Authentication
Each of those desktop hosting providers have different cost and benefit profiles, and most can vary quite a bit as well. A physical workstation, for example, could be a bare-bones PC or a top-of-the-line 3D rendering station packed with the very best professional GPUs available. There is no such thing as a “standard desktop” anymore.
By taking advantage of the dynamic assignment capabilities of connection brokers, organizations can ensure that people are assigned the desktop environments they need for the job they are doing at that time, and that those desktop environments can then be freed up for someone else when not in use. For large, expensive desktop environments like 3D workstations, this can produce significant savings across a globally distributed workforce. Similarly, this capability can be used to ensure that those who need it – such as application developers – can compile and/or test their software in multiple different desktop environments.
Simplifying End User Support
The centralization that connection brokers offer also brings new capabilities to IT support teams that aren’t possible – or aren’t possible nearly as easily – using traditional EUC approaches. By centralizing user connections for both physical and virtual environments, connection brokers can provide both dashboard-level and detailed visibility into connection and desktop environment performance, identify and provide access to environments requiring support, and even assign people to desktop environments based on the status and performance of the available desktop pools.
Premier connection brokers stand out in part due to their support for facilitating collaboration. For display protocols that support collaboration, a connection broker can leverage the native remote assistance and session management features of these protocols. Support teams can provide session shadowing-level support to anyone using the connection broker, regardless of the desktop environment they are connecting to:
Security integration
Advanced connection brokers also include optimizing capabilities that select the best protocols and configurations to optimize performance, various customizable policies, and APIs to enable custom integrations with existing toolchains and IT workflows. When combined with the ability to support multiple authentication providers, the broker becomes more than just a way to find a remote desktop to connect to, and it becomes a means to encode regulatory compliance for privacy, support, and even data access directly into the policies of the tool used to access desktop environments.
Regulatory compliance
Combining native security capabilities with those inherent to the authentication and infrastructure providers themselves enables context-based dynamic policy enforcement capabilities generally viewed as necessary to achieve Zero Trust Network Access. These include time-based access control (time-gating), access-attempt restrictions (attempt-gating), geo-blocking or geo-assignment of resources, mandatory authorization on every access to specific resources, access restriction based on device security posture, and more. The better solutions also offer integration with network solutions supporting micro-segmentation, furthering the ability of IT teams to implement least-privilege access starting at the connection layer.
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A Better Mousetrap
Connection brokers can improve the EUC experience by connecting people to the best desktop environment for the job, whatever the job happens to be that day. It can connect people to multiple desktop environments if they need them and impose whatever security and regulatory requirements exist, all managed and supported in one place. More importantly, connection brokers can do all of the above across multiple underlying infrastructure platforms, which is empowering for any organization.
The ability to use multiple infrastructure providers means that organizations can redirect people to alternate desktop environments during a disaster recovery or business continuity scenario. Leveraging a connection broker can facilitate this by managing replication and failover between on-premises and cloud environments. This same capability also allows organizations to choose infrastructure providers based upon capabilities and cost without locking organizations into any one infrastructure provider.
Today’s organizations are spoiled for choice in the EUC market while simultaneously grappling with an increasingly complex regulatory and security environment. Connection brokers are necessary for navigating this complexity while maintaining a consistently acceptable end-user experience.