Azure Virtual Desktop

Azure Virtual Desktop has been the go-to remote desktop management solution in two of the organizations I have worked for. It was central in enabling remote work for us during the 2020-2022 period, and is still crucial as far as ensuring contributors work within a trust-agnostic environment and for ensuring compliance. The scale of use was significant in both cases (all remote & hybrid workers).

• Immediately reduced value drift
• Reduced security incidents by 85%
• Cut down tool access delay in half

Citrix DaaS

Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access, Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Copilot

Azure Virtual Desktop has been our replacement for Citrix XenDesktop. While we deploy laptops with VPN tunnels, we have always found the need to have some virtual desktop presence. It has its place in our DR Planning, as well as proving a valuable tool for temporary access during hardware issues. Although it is not heavily used, it can be scaled up to meet demands.

• We already have M365 E3, so not having to purchase additional licensing helped cover our user pool.
• Automatic scaling sets allow us to run what is actually needed, compared to having servers running constantly in our previous environment.

XenServer

Nerdio, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Databricks, Azure Automation

Citrix Desktop license become costly and not reliable in our infrastructure. Primary used this to solve the secure remote access and terminal desktops for external users.

• Generally, Positive so far. From business objectives, we covered security, scalability and efficiency but implementing AVD.
• User are able to work securely from anywhere and support hybrid model as well.
• however, ongoing attention require to make sure you are not over sizing the host pools and cost remain in expected budget.

Citrix Gateway and Citrix Secure Private Access

We leverage AVD for all non-persistent desktops, this allows us to follow our cloud first strategy, this is leveraged in US-East region and support users globally.

• AVD has allowed us to move additional applications to the cloud
• AVD supports our organization globally running out of US-East
• AVD has a better ROI now that Broadcom has changed pricing model to per core.

Azure VMware Solution and Amazon WorkSpaces

Rubrik, AWS Backup, Azure AI Document Intelligence, AWS Storage Gateway

We are using Azure Virtual Desktop or AVD on large scale as a Common Shared desktop to showcase our test builds to end users. as we have a large team, we used separate instances for all builds. Azure Virtual Desktop played a vital role in removing this bottleneck. now we use a single AVD desktop for all the testing.

• scalability
• cost
• ease of use

• saved a lot by removing individual instances
• we can use one license for one system and essentially share it with as much staff as we want
• we saved a lot on Microsoft products

Remote Desktop Services and VNC Connect

Remote Desktop Services, VNC Connect, AnyDesk