You run a small business, and you put your heart and soul into it. Your entire focus is on doing what it takes to enable your business to meet its goals. What you don’t want is to have to spend time and energy on the nuts and bolts of providing the computer and IT support your growing business depends on.
If that describes you, a new service recently introduced by Microsoft may be just what your business needs. It’s called Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), and it allows small businesses, as well as larger enterprises, to meet their computing needs through the cloud with only a minimum of on-site IT support.
What is WVD all about? Let’s take a look.
What is Windows Virtual Desktop?
WVD can be described as a “Desktop as a Service” offering delivered through Microsoft’s Azure cloud service platform. But what, exactly, does that mean for your business?
If you use a Windows computer or laptop in your work, you’re used to calling up the programs you want to use through the Windows desktop on your machine. All the resources it takes to do that, from the applications you run, to the Windows desktop you interact with, to the Windows operating system itself, are stored on your computer’s hard drive.
WVD moves all those resources off your hard drive and into the cloud. In fact, as we’ll see, the devices you use to run Windows applications with WVD may not even have a hard drive of their own. Instead, WVD provides a virtualized environment in which your workers access their desktops and applications through a centralized cloud portal. With this approach, the programs you use don’t actually run on your local computers, but in the cloud.
This means that whether your business has one employee using Windows, or a hundred, all can continue to access the same Windows desktops, applications and data they have traditionally used, but without your business having to provide IT support for all those individual computers and the network that ties them together. In fact, your employees don’t have to use a Windows computer at all. With WVD they can run Windows and all their Windows-based applications from a Mac, a Linux computer, a tablet, or even their smartphones.
Industry insiders are calling WVD a “game changer.” But do these new capabilities really provide substantial benefits for a business like yours?
WVD advantages for small businesses
Here are some of the game-changing advantages WVD can bring to your business.
1. Full Windows Compatibility
With WVD you won’t have to make any substantial changes to the way your employees work, or the applications they are used to running. WVD is fully compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 10 (you can choose which to offer). All of your present Windows programs, whether commercial or home-grown, plus familiar productivity applications like Office 365 (now Microsoft 365), can run under WVD exactly the way they currently run on your Windows computers.
WVD also offers a Windows 10 multi-session feature that allows multiple users to log into the same Windows virtual machine (VM). This means your employees can all share the same desktop and applications. It also lowers your costs since your WVD charges will depend, in part, on the number of VMs you are running.
2. Flexibility to Work Remotely Using Almost Any Type of Device
In these days when the coronavirus pandemic has caused large numbers of employees to work from home, WVD provides them with the ability run the applications they need from literally anywhere there’s an internet connection. All that’s required is a supported device with the WVD app installed, or even just a web-enabled device such as a laptop, tablet or smartphone that can support an HTML-5 browser. WVD client apps are available for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android devices.
This is one of those aspects of WVD that truly can be called game-changing. The ability to run Windows applications from non-Windows devices provides a level of flexibility that was never before available, at least not with the ease of use and cost effectiveness WVD provides. Many of your employees will be able to work remotely without your business having to supply them with company-owned laptops or other devices. In many cases, if not most, they can use their own personal desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone with minimal adjustments for accessibility and security.
3. Reduced Capital and Operating Expenses
Simply put, not having to purchase a fully equipped Windows-compatible computer for each worker who needs to run Windows applications can save you a lot of money.
First of all, WVD allows use of what are called “thin clients.” These are devices that don’t necessarily have the hard drives or the amounts of RAM a normal computer requires in order to operate on its own. These resources are not needed because all the real computing work is being done in the cloud, not on the device.
Thin client devices can cost substantially less than traditional desktop computers. For example, because a high degree of compute power is not required, a relatively inexpensive laptop might meet your employees’ needs as well as a high-powered desktop computer could.
Plus, in many cases you won’t need to purchase hardware at all if workers use their own personal devices to do their jobs remotely. In such cases, not only is your business relieved of the need to make capital expenditures for hardware, but it also avoids the ongoing operating expenses required to support those devices.
Like most cloud-based services, WVD operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. You pay only for the resources you actually use. You never have to purchase resources up front in anticipation of requirements that may or may not develop in the future.
By one estimate, reported in CRN Magazine, WVD has the potential to reduce end-user infrastructure costs by as much as 80 percent.
4. Instant Provisioning and High Scalability
Provisioning and scaling are areas in which cloud-based services excel. Traditionally, as your business grew you’d have to go through a cycle of purchasing new IT equipment and integrating it into your operations. This took substantial amounts not only of money, but of time as well. But with cloud services like WVD, the cloud services provider (Azure in this case) is responsible for bringing additional resources online as needed. In many cases it requires little more than the click of a mouse to instantly scale to the level required. And, as previously mentioned, until you actually use additional resources, you don’t have to pay for them.
5. Simplified IT management
WVD allows you to transfer many of your concerns about IT operations, hardware maintenance, software upgrades, and expanding capacity, to Azure. Previously, deploying new or upgraded software may have required that an IT support person perform that task for each of your computers. With WVD such deployments are centralized in the cloud, and can be done once rather than multiple times.
6. Increased Data Security
With hundreds of thousands of employees now working remotely for the first time, data security has become an even greater concern than it previously was. Although business owners are sometimes concerned that using the cloud might make their data more vulnerable to being compromised by cybercriminals, in reality the opposite will almost certainly be the case.
According to Microsoft, the WVD security program benefits from Azure’s long-established, industry-leading security profile. This includes a $1 billion annual cybersecurity expenditure, 3,500 full-time security professionals, and continuous security updates. Most small businesses would find it a bit difficult to match that kind of security posture on their own.
A particular advantage of WVD is that it does not require (in fact, need not allow) sensitive data to be downloaded to workers’ devices. All the applications and data remote workers use to perform their jobs are kept secure in the cloud. Workers use the WVD remote desktop to initiate and manage the applications they run without either the applications or the data they work with ever being brought into the user’s device.
Although keeping endpoint devices free of malware should always be a high priority, with WVD the consequences of a failure in that regard will be much less than if sensitive information actually resided on the device.
One of the most important security benefits of WVD is that it allows centralized security management. Administrators need not worry about securing data that’s being held on client devices. Security standards can be enforced from one place, and are much less dependent on the efforts of inexperienced end users.
7. Improved Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
An unforeseen disaster can literally wipe out a small business. In fact, according to the U. S. Small Business Administration, more than 90 percent of businesses directly impacted by a disaster fail within the following two years. But WVD makes achieving a high degree of disaster recovery and business continuity readiness much easier for small businesses.
Even if a fire or flood should destroy your business facility, with WVD your IT resources in the cloud would be unaffected. Employees could continue their work from any location with an internet connection. That means that in many cases, with proper planning, your business will be able to continue serving customers even while its physical facilities (and computer equipment) remain unavailable.
WVD can indeed be a game changer for your business
In the CRN Magazine article referenced above, Jed Ayres, CEO of IGEL North America, estimates that 50 million small business customers will move to WVD over the next few years. If your business isn’t one of them, you risk putting yourself at a severe competitive disadvantage.
If you’d like to know more about how WVD can help keep your business moving forward, Applied Innovations can help. Please contact us.