Making Remote Working Work: Flexibility, Agility, and Consistency with VDI Solution VMware Horizon for VMware Cloud on AWS

Remote working, once considered a marginal perk, has become the norm, boosted to prominence by the global pandemic. Companies are increasingly working with internal and external team members who are not on the same continent, much less in the same office. For companies that manage significant amounts of data, remote working in all its forms presents the best answer to a host of challenges, but also some new challenges of its own. Providing an efficient, familiar, and smooth work environment while also ensuring security, planning for disaster recovery, provisioning workloads, and enabling scale presents complex challenges that must be addressed when attempting to configure a unified system across disparate locales.

To enable this shift, virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI, is becoming an increasingly important part of both corporate and IT strategy, making it possible for IT professionals to deliver desktop and remote applications to employees and contractors as managed services. VMware Horizon provides a remote working solution that is powerful, comprehensive, and simple to use. Combined with cloud-based or hybrid deployment on VMware Cloud on AWS, Horizon can be set up quickly and adjusted on demand according to customer needs, from the infrastructure to the workspace, enabling a significantly more agile solution that can be achieved with VDI in an on-prem environment.

What is VMware Horizon?

VMware Horizon enables IT departments to run desktop applications and virtual machines in the data center or cloud, automating and simplifying desktop and application security management. It offers centralized monitoring to reduce downtime, user-specific settings and smart policy options based on the user’s role, device, and location, and streamlined image and application management. Horizon also improves the user experience by unifying communication and collaboration, streamlining access from any device, and optimizing display options. Just as critically, Horizon stores data securely supports compliance with many regulations and industry standards and enables migration of virtual desktop workloads to cloud platforms.

What is VMware Cloud on AWS?

VMware Cloud on AWS solves a variety of migration and modernization challenges. For its part, VMC provides an enterprise-ready platform with consistent infrastructure, WAN-optimized and encrypted live migration of virtual machines, and automated provisioning and management using Infrastructure as a Code. With AWS, enterprises also get a consistent and straightforward way for their applications to access a broad range of AWS services, including storage, database and analytics, networking, security, machine learning, and more.

Why VMware Horizon for VMC on AWS?

VMware Horizon for VMware Cloud on AWS combines the advantages of VMware Horizon with the enterprise capabilities of the VMWare Software-Defined Data Center, including compute, storage, and networking, delivered as a service on AWS. The result is so much more than the sum of its parts. Deploying Horizon on VMWare Cloud pulls from the same toolbox and images the company is already using, making it easy to add and extend desktop services without the need for additional expenditure on data center resources. Cloud management is simplified since businesses can secure applications, infrastructure, data, and access with a consistent, comprehensive, and intrinsic security solution from the data center to the cloud. And with VMC on AWS, businesses have added flexibility, enabling dynamic deployment to improve business continuity, disaster recovery, and burst capacity. Further, Horizon for VMC on AWS allows companies to optimize infrastructure costs with flexible, use-based billing — a pay-as-you-grow model.

There are countless situations where VMware Horizon’s robust, comprehensive, and simplified solutions for virtual desktops transform performance. To highlight a few:

Dynamic Allocation of Resources
For a company that works with contractors on a project basis, there may be significant need differences from one quarter to another, depending on whether a significant project begins or ends. Thanks to the dynamic nature of VMware Cloud on AWS, adding 1000 contractor users at the start of a project or removing 500 at the end requires no unnecessary costs or effort, and no wasted resources — the cloud infrastructure scales up and down on demand while VDI with Horizon provides secure, streamline access to each additional user from a unified management dashboard.

Burst Capacity
Similarly, Horizon for VMC on AWS enables cloud burst capacity for expanding resources in bulk quickly. When demand for VDI resources is greater than the existing on-prem infrastructure can provide, using VMC on AWS means the company can burst to the cloud using the same toolbox they’re already using, with the same infrastructure and base image.

Developer Resources
Developers consume a variety of resources from Amazon including, AI, S3, EKS, RDS, and DynamoDB. Having the VDI solution on AWS means VDI resources are closely located to all of the other services the developers are already using, which improves networking and latency securely.

VMware Horizon, VMware Cloud, and Amazon Web Services each represent a world unto themselves; combined, they offer a comprehensive and robust VDI solution.

TeraSky

Most companies can’t afford to divert expertise and manpower from their business goals toward learning how to implement and optimize solutions like these. That’s where TeraSky’s dedicated End User Computing experts come in. As a VMware Premier Partner and 2021 VMware Partner of the Year, and an AWS Consulting Partner with numerous AWS certifications, TeraSky’s team members are experts in every aspect of this solution offering and have worked on some of the most significant VDI projects on the market. We’ll assess and advise a plan of action according to your specific needs and circumstances, ensuring you achieve greater agility and consistent global deployment with minimal risks and cost.