Azure Virtual Desktop - All Your Questions

Our customers typically throw any number of of questions at us when we propose they might benefit from deploying Azure Virtual Desktop. We highlight some of these questions (and answers) below. Hopefully it will help you see the benefits too...

How will Azure Virtual Desktop help my employees to work remotely?

• Whether in the field, working remote, or travelling, employees will be able to access their desktop environment with Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). AVD works across devices, and from any location with an internet connection!
• AVD provides users with a full Windows 10 experience and the productivity and business intelligent tools that they know and love.
• Moving to AVD might also enable you to drop usage of that slow, legacy VPN. Happy users here we come!

Why should we trust Azure Virtual Desktop?

• Microsoft invests more than $1 billion annually on cybersecurity research and development
• Microsoft employs more than 3,500 security experts completed dedicated to your its customers’ data security and privacy
• Azure has more compliance certifications than any other cloud provider
• 5 million threat signals are detected and analysed daily, feeding back into an increasingly self-learning, secure platform
• Access to the Virtual Desktop can be conditionally restricted to specific users, devices, locations, days of the week and times of the day

Is my sensitive company data safe?

• AVD is built in Azure, so it is secure by design. AVD users log in to access their desktop environment, so you can easily protect sensitive company and customer information with Multi-Factor Authentication.
• AVD was designed to keep confidential customer information secure. Role-based access control in AVD allows you to easily manage user groups and assign permissions to protect sensitive information. 

I already use a Remote Desktop Services (or VDI) solution

• AVD is the next generation of Virtual Desktop technology combining the great user experience of previous desktop virtualization technology with the affordable price of traditional RDS solutions.
• Your users will love the full Windows 10 experience, and you can use AVD’s built-in management plane, or keep using your existing Citrix or VMWare service.

Will this increase our IT Spend?

• AVD is a unique solution because it provides a better user experience, at a lower overall cost than other desktop virtualization solutions. With AVD you can utilize your Microsoft 365 subscriptions (most SKUs) to cover licensing costs and pay only for Azure infrastructure.
• AVD has the unique benefit of being the only solution that provides a Windows 10 desktop experience at multi-session cost. It’s the best of traditional Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, at the cost of a Remote Desktop Solution.

Will this require additional end-user training or burden our IT staff with yet another system to support?

• AVD is intuitive, and once installed, users won’t be able to tell the difference between their AVD environment and a traditional desktop environment. As far as management goes, the team here at Fuse is ready to answer all your questions and make sure the deployment goes smoothly.
• AVD is designed to provide familiar management through the Azure portal, and sync easily with your Active Directory. So once AVD is set up, Fuse will be able to provide management support remotely, giving back more time to your IT staff.

Is this going to cause massive disruption and upset?

• Changes in technology can be disruptive. We think this is another reason to consider upgrading to AVD. Because AVD is hosted in Azure, you won’t have to worry about hardware upgrades and can take advantage of backup and disaster recovery features in Azure. In Azure your desktop will be highly scalable, easy to manage, and secure by design.
• The end goal is a system that is very familiar to staff, as though they are still in the office, and gives them easy access from wherever they are and whatever device they have (if that’s what you want!).

We have just invested in new laptop hardware across the organisation, why would we use AVD?

• Fair enough, maybe you don’t want to move everyone to AVD right now, but you still might see benefits in some use-cases...
• Do you have a specific resource-heavy piece of software that only needs to be run every so often?
• Or do you have a certain department that needs to leverage a piece of software that you host and needs to be run close (on the same network) to its underlying database?
• Do you want to restrict some of your data from being downloaded on to your employees’ devices?
• Does any of your software still need to run in a supported Windows 7 environment?
• These are just some scenarios where running a targeted AVD environment might benefit your business. For instance, how about running that monthly, resource-intensive, processing task in a beefy Azure machine that can run it in a quarter of the time.

My staff don’t want to have to log in to another machine?

• Then take a look at Remote App Streaming
• Remote app streaming allows you to run your app in Azure and stream it to a remote device.
• Use Azure Virtual Desktop for app streaming to create a low-latency, high-performance user experience from virtually anywhere on any device.

We do a lot of Video-Conferencing and use Teams for Telephony – will that still work?

• Yes – Microsoft has created an enhanced version of Teams targeted at AVD usage.
• This gives you the best conferencing and media experience of any remote desktop solution.
• Using Multimedia Redirection, you will get high-performance, low-latency audio and video calling.

 

So what next?

Find more information about our Azure Virtual Desktop services here, and there's more info elsewhere in this blog. If you have any further questions please get in touch, we'd love to discuss your situation and try to help you find the best-fit solution.