I remember some fatherly advice I got a while back that I wish, in hindsight, I would have taken a bit more seriously. The bumps, bruises, bristles, friction, frustration, and pain I could have avoided almost make me laugh now. Perhaps it was my youthful bravado, a rebellious spirit, or simply something you must go through in growing up. That thing called learning. I get it now.
“Don’t be afraid to walk away from a bad decision just because you took a lot of time making it.”
I am not saying our legacy PC models were bad decisions at all, however when I see the stubborn abandon with which we cling to some of our old operating models – in the face of absolute and resolute change – well it is troubling. It is also very very fixable.
Our biggest challenge right now is not HOW to build reliable remote workspaces. Our biggest challenge right now, is WILL WE?
11 years ago we shared a methodology with the early adopters of VDI. The notion was to take a look at the current state of your PC’s, users, apps, storage, and the infrastructure you use and pay for, to deliver them (assess the usage+configuration of everything).
Next, we use your assessment data and findings (and your brain) to come up with your architectural design, your application strategy, now your cloud strategy, your security posture, etc. We pick platforms, vendors, end points, integrators and trusted advisors.
Image management is and should be key. Solutions that enable what my good friend at AWS calls “ephemeral desktops” are to be preferred. Everything is a service, available to the end user, in the event they might need it, but not before. ProfileUnity, FlexApp, FSlogix, Appstream 2.0, XiFrame, NetApp VDS, some elements of VMware and Citrix offerings, Microsoft WVD, MSIX, itopia on Google Cloud, HYCU, all with end points from Igel and more are all examples of this. Yes, the entire Liquidware Essentials Suite is native and supported on ALL of these platforms.
When our design and vendor selection is done, we use a solution like ProfileUnity to migrate, in context, the elements from the users legacy machine; their settings, customization, documents and files, – and migrate that to your production deployment on prem, on Hyper-converged solutions like Nutanix, in an Azure FSlogix or Liquidware (or both) profile container, Amazon Workspaces, AppStream2.0, GCP, your choice! Demand your images work for you, not the other way around. Layer in your apps with MSIX, or present them with Appstream2.0 and FlexApp for 100% coverage and scale. What works best? Bring in LoginVSI to assist you with the change management needed.
Then Health check that deployment or SpotCheck it. If things are working (app layering, profiles, thin clients, security, printing) do more of them, if they are not, do less. This new decade of the desktop is just that – a 10 year decision we can make now, or rather, the old decisions we can unmake now.
The trickiest part will be to operate this new stack. If we now live in a world where 1,000,000,000 users are no longer down the hall from IT….who will fix stuff? Great question. While not authorized to fully share our plans in this domain, I can assure you that true to form, Liquidware is reading ahead in this book we are all writing in anticipation of what Agencies, Organizations, and Enterprises around the world will need to operationalize the new normal and manage Windows, remotely, at scale. Remote Management and Monitoring will be fundamental.
Much has and is being written about the safety, health and psychological benefits of working from home with less “lag and latency” in the transition between “work” and “life” (anyone really going to miss traffic?). However, now that the finance department is also in on the conversation and realizes the cost savings, productivity, leverage, and yield they get from these new remote working models…the horse has left the barn.
With personnel and the costs to support them (and their tech) as the largest line item in many an organizational P&L -Â how your workers do their work for maximum productivity has just surpassed Moore’s Law in importance.
Yep, the ability to increase user productivity is more important than the progression of more powerful compute.
We are now seeing the most massive swell in sentiment I have personally seen in 33 years of paying attention. Working remotely will be preferred over primary office attendance for the next ten years. With the right methodology, trusted advisors, vendors, and a little bit of courage, your digital transformation can extend out and across your end users.
We started and built Liquidware to take this desktop life-cycle journey with you, and we are beyond proud that millions and millions of users have.
It is now, the #decade_of_the_Desktop
T.Rex – May 2020
[…] As our co-founder Tyler Rohrer wrote recently in a blog post, "Working remotely will be preferred over primary campus + mandatory attendance models in all use […]