5 Steps to Grow Your MSP Practice by 50% 

5-Steps-to-Grow-your-MSP-Practice-by-50-percent

As a business owner, you are busy. Some weeks it feels like you are running from one fire to the next. Despite all your plans, your hopes, your dreams for what a week might look like – the reality is often very different. I have been there. In the ten years I spent as the CEO of my MSP, I had great weeks and very bad ones. The stress of running a small business often doesn’t leave much time during the day for dealing with what you know is most important. Weeks have a tendency of turning into months. The goals in your head (and hopefully written down somewhere) aren’t always achieved. At Nerdio, I have had the opportunity to talk to dozens of MSPs every week. In those conversations, I get to hear what is working and just as importantly, what isn’t working. Today, we will focus on five of the things we hear MSPs are focusing on. 

1. Focus On Value 

Think for a moment about how much you charge for your “all-in” managed services. Do potential clients ever push back? Have you ever finished a proposal – looked at the price and wondered if your services are worth it? Maybe you even lowered the price before ever actually talking to the client. I hear from MSPs every week that fall into the trap of undervaluing their services.  

One of the single most impactful changes you can make is to start charging what you are worth. Increasing your overall rates can feel like a daunting task. There are many ways to approach this. In many cases you will need to reset expectations with your existing clients. One opportunity to do this is to roll out a new type of service such as Windows Virtual Desktop. For instance, I recently spoke to an MSP that was previously charging way too little for all-inclusive support. He knew it was too low, and over the last year had increased his rates by 10%. One client felt like the 10% increase was too much but signed on begrudgingly.  

Fast forward 6 months and it is time for the same client to invest in new hardware for their on-premises environment. The MSP decided to propose a move to Azure with WVD. He had very little hope that the deal would close, but we talked through the value proposition of cloud, the advantages he would be able to give the client, and take for himself. He delivered the message and the final proposal. The client chose, without hesitating, to move to the cloud. He was making 30% on the Azure and WVD Services, plus increased his total MSP rate by 250%. He now has his managed service price set correctly and the client was happy to pay it because he focused on the value of the overall solution and the service he would be providing. 

2. Identify Your Targets 

It can be easy to chase every lead that comes in the door, but some clients won’t appreciate the value you bring. Know what you are and know what you are not. Some clients won’t be on board with your approach or how you do business. That is okay. You won’t be happy with them and they won’t be happy with you. I encourage you to do the following exercise: Create a list with your current clients on it; include their industry, number of users, the total you charge them each month, and the type of agreements you have. Do the math to know what your average per-user price is for each client, then add one more column to grade them with an A, B, or C.  

A Clients = those that value how you do business; you want 100 more just like them.  

B Clients = those that with a little coaching or a tweak to their agreement/expectations they would be a good fit.  

C Clients = those you should respectfully see out the door. They require more work for less money. They question everything you do.  There are several ways to approach this which I won’t get into here, but if at all possible, you need these clients to decide to leave on their own. They may not be a good fit, but they own a business, and likely have friends that would be a good fit.  

Now that you have performed this exercise, take a look at your A list. What do these clients do? Are there similarities between them? Why are they a good fit? With the answer to those questions, you now know who your ideal client is. Build your MSP to cater to those types of clients. Market to them. Learn their industry. If specific technical solutions are important to them or help them grow their business – learn them. Your profitability will increase and your exposure in your region will grow.  

We see many MSPs running through this exercise as they build out their cloud practice. Knowing the types of clients you already work well with helps to simplify your cloud offering and focus your energy so you can quickly speak fluently to the right client for you. 

3. Client Engagement 

Talk to your clients. I know this sounds silly at first, but it can’t be said enough. Create a regular cadence of meetings with each client. Some people call them Quarterly Business Reviews, but once a quarter isn’t always the right fit. Some will need monthly meetings while others need to meet once every 6 months. When you go and speak with them, have an agenda, and keep to the same agenda every single time. Follow the same outline for every single client, as this helps you deliver the right information more effectively and it helps the client understand how to digest it. Don’t take information to them that they are paying you to care about. Instead, stay big picture. For instance, it isn’t helpful for them to see a list of every patch you applied; it is helpful for them to know you applied patches to 100% of their environment. Be sure to talk about the future, such as what investments they will need to make in the future. Ask about their business goals, what changes they anticipate, and what keeps them up at night. Be sure they know what new solutions you are adding to your offering and what investments you are making in your own business. Don’t be afraid to tell them what keeps you up at night, too. 

Unfortunately, I speak to too many MSPs that aren’t doing this. As a result, they end up scrambling to come up with technical solutions for problems they didn’t know their clients were having. I recently spoke to an MSP that had a client about to leave them. The client found a new provider that offered cloud solutions. Since the MSP wasn’t meeting with the client regularly, the client just assumed they had to go somewhere else to get their problem solved. Thankfully, in this case, the client decided to call just to make sure before signing on with the new MSP. 

Engaging with your clients regularly gives you visibility into their business and their goals and provides a chance to unlock all kinds of potential growth. Opportunities with the client you didn’t know existed will arise, and issues they are having can often be solved by implementing new technology. In addition, regular conversations build a stronger relationship between you and another business owner. When you ask for them to introduce you to someone else that can use your services, they will feel much more comfortable doing so. 

4. Thought Leadership 

So, you have a clear understanding of your value, you know who you want to talk to, you know how you are going to deliver your service, and you are using regular meetings to provide you with a feedback loop and give you the opportunity to engage with your clients. It is time to take all of that and find opportunities to speak to more of the right kinds of clients. Wherever the types of clients on your “A” list like to hang out, you should hang out too. Ask for the chance to speak, join groups, go to happy hours, go to industry breakfasts and other networking opportunities, and sponsor their events and go take part. Don’t give up. In my experience, it can take 18 to 24 months to become part of a community and not be seen as just the new kid on the block. Share what you know, the experiences you have had, and how technology helped your current clients overcome issues, increase profitability, and solve new problems.  People are especially interested in hearing about cloud solutions and security today – take advantage of whatever the latest buzz is and go find places to speak about it.  

5. Plan, Set Goals, and Communicate 

As we near the end of the list, let’s talk about growth. You want to increase your MSP Practice by 50%. What does that look like for you? Everything we have talked about helps support this kind of growth, but if you aren’t planning for it, setting goals, and communicating it to your team, you won’t get there. 50% growth doesn’t happen by accident. First, of course, you must decide what it is exactly you want to grow by 50%. Your Revenue? Number of users you support? Your profit?  

Once you have determined exactly how you want to measure the growth, create a plan to hit that goal by a certain date. Now, work backwards so that you know exactly what you have to do every month, even every week, to reach the goal. Is it reasonable? What investments will you need to make? What changes in your processes need to occur? Create a clear and transparent way to measure and track your progress. 

Now, tell everyone about it; tell your entire team where you are going and how you are going to get there. Tell them when you are on target and even when you have missed the target. Ask for feedback. Celebrate when you get there! 

Final Thoughts 

Today, we have discussed a handful of important areas to focus on to grow your business by 50%. Change won’t happen overnight. To grow your business, like all growth, takes many small steps. If growing your cloud practice is one of the ways you intend to grow your business, Nerdio would be glad to help you on your journey. 

Schedule a demo call with us now and we’ll walk you through just how easy it can be. 

Nerdio Manager for Enterprise Case Study: Naylor

Case Study

Learn how a global association organization saved 50% on Azure Virtual Desktop deployment time compared to using the Azure Portal to deploy AVD. 

 

About Naylor Association Solutions

For more than fifty years, Naylor Association Solutions has helped trade and professional associations build and maintain strong and profitable relationships with their members. Naylor offers a comprehensive suite of solutions that engages members and generates non-dues revenue. The suite includes offerings that focus on communications strategies, print and digital communications, full-service event management, advertising, sponsorships and exhibit sales, career centers, online learning, association management, and member management software. 

Naylor is headquartered in McLean, VA with additional offices across the United States and Canada. The company provides services and solutions to over 1,800 associations in more than one hundred industries. 

The Situation

Like many organizations, Naylor had primarily deployed on-premises solutions over the years. Its twenty-five IT personnel supported approximately four hundred employees spread across multiple locations.

More recently, Naylor had started gradually moving toward a more hybrid architecture with some Microsoft 365 cloud-based virtual solutions in addition to its existing, on-premises solutions. However, when a potential security issue arose in 2020, the company significantly sped up its transition to a cloud-based infrastructure, built around Microsoft’s VDI capabilities. 

“As we ramped up our investments in cloud-based infrastructure, we realized we wanted a more centralized way to manage everything,” said Rob Armstrong, IT Support Specialist for Naylor. “We wanted a simpler solution than Microsoft’s native offering.”

The Solution

Based on a recommendation from its Dell hardware contact, Naylor reached out to Nerdio to start an evaluation of Nerdio Manager for Enterprise. What the company found, impressed them.

“Nerdio is a fantastic product,” said Armstrong. “The level of support we’ve received from Nerdio has been incredible. We’ve literally received responses within 15-20 minutes on product and configuration questions.”

To evaluate Nerdio, Naylor did a compare-and-contrast analysis between Nerdio and existing Azure functions to decide if there was enough value to implement it. 

“Our team was really attracted by Nerdio’s ease-of-management,” said Armstrong “We had lots of things coming together that we needed to deploy quickly and Nerdio Manager for Enterprise was a way to do that with more ease than  Azure’s native solutions. There were also some things that Azure can’t do and Nerdio can, and that’s just one reason it’s been so helpful to us. Overall, Nerdio Manager for Enterprise is definitely easier than Azure’s built-in portal options.” 

The Results

As a result of its initial analysis, Naylor deployed Nerdio Manager for Enterprise in late 2020 and relies on it for day-to-day management and monitoring of its business-critical Azure Virtual Desktop deployments. 

The results for Naylor have been superb. Not only has Nerdio Manager for Enterprise made overall management of its virtual environment easier, but it’s allowed Naylor to limit its spending on Azure each month. Nerdio Manager for Enterprise enables Naylor to manage Azure costs closely and optimize the money it spends.

“The use case for Nerdio Manager for Enterprise is very strong. The dollars that you spend compared to the efficiency you receive is well worth it.” – Rob Armstrong, IT Support Specialist at Naylor.

Naylor relies heavily on Nerdio’s Desktop Auto-Scaling and Ephemeral OS Disks functions, which enable Naylor to create new virtual machine images each morning for use by employees during the day and then when people log off at night, shutting them down to 
save money. 

“Cost is always a concern,” said Armstrong. “We’ve found that the Cost Estimator tool built into Nerdio is really helpful for budgetary purposes. We always want to keep an eye on costs and keep the minimal number of hosts running. Nerdio’s auto-scaling and other features definitely help us control costs so they fit our needs.”

In addition to saving money, Nerdio has also enabled Naylor to increase its level of security in a straight-forward way. “Using Nerdio, it is super-quick and simple to change the local user accounts that are deployed for VMs,” said Armstrong. “There’s no need to slough through the Azure screens to figure out what’s what.”

For Naylor, implementing Nerdio Manager for Enterprise has been a win that enables it to serve its association members more efficiently and effectively. In practical terms, the solution not only saves Naylor money that might be spent on inefficient virtual environments, but it also saves considerable time that would otherwise be spent by technicians managing various settings or using native Azure tools.

“I’d say Nerdio Manager for Enterprise has saved us between 33-50% of the deployment time that would be needed in native Azure environment,”  – Rob Armstrong, IT Support Specialist at Naylor.

“Specifically, in our ability to scale deployments and make mass changes to our AVD environment more efficiently. In addition, a lot of the more granular options that Nerdio provides simply aren’t available in the Azure Portal. The more you use Nerdio, the more valuable it will be.”


Download the application today from the Azure marketplace and begin a free 30-day trial: nerdio.co/nme

DOWNLOAD THE CASE STUDY HERE

Find Nerdio in the Azure Marketplace: nerdio.co/nme

How to Quickly & Easily Move Your Existing Windows Virtual Desktop (AVD) Deployment to Nerdio Manager for Enterprise

I have spoken to over 250 different partners and customers throughout the last 10 months. Not only has it been a lot of fun, but it has also been very educational. As a result, I have worked with many smart and fun people, enabling me to view hundreds of different Azure Virtual Desktop environments as well.

Not just the ones built and managed with Nerdio, no; most were already in place and being used for test or production purposes. However, many of these organizations had something in common: they were all looking for a better, easier, and more efficient way to manage and optimize their AVD environments, which inevitably led them to Nerdio.

75% of the people I talk to already have an existing AVD deployment in place. It is no coincidence that they end up with Nerdio, as they all seem to have the same challenges:

  • The lack of Azure knowledge within the company
  • Azure can be overwhelming and AVD comes with a steep learning curve
  • Lots of manual (PowerShell) tasks are involved
  • Companies worry about that knowledge leaving their company
  • Azure and AVD can be (very) expensive if you do not know what to look out for and lack proper tolling to help you with that
  • Big feature gap – Most companies think AVD is not production-ready and misses enterprise-grade features and functionalities

All valid concerns and challenges that we run into daily.

Enter Nerdio Manager for Enterprise

It won’t come as a surprise that Nerdio takes care of all the above. Next to that, a question we get a lot is, “OK, I want to explore Nerdio, but I already have a AVD Tenant and/or Workspace in use, what are my options? Do I need to start over, can I reuse my existing host pools, how much time will this take me, etc?”

The answer is reassuring. You can reuse everything you’ve built by onboarding your existing AVD deployment(s) into Nerdio Manager for AVD within minutes and without disrupting any of your users. This means you can do this during production hours without having to worry about your users noticing a thing.

Installing Nerdio Manager for Enterprise

I always refer to getting Azure Virtual Desktop up and running as being a very boring process. This is because Nerdio automates just about every step you can think of. Once Nerdio Manager for AVD is installed, which will take 25 to 30 minutes (all you have to do is wait) depending on how busy Azure is, setting up your initial AVD Workspace together with a hot pool and a couple of virtual machines to go with it only takes an additional 15 minutes or so. That’s assuming you don’t already have an existing AVD deployment in place, of course.

If you do have an existing AVD environment that you would like to continue using, onboarding it into Nerdio Manager for AVD will even be faster; 5-15 minutes depending on how many host pools you have together with the number of virtual machines that need to be “associated” with Nerdio Manager for AVD. We’ll get to that in a bit more detail later on.

Managing Your AVD VMs Will Be Done for You

After deploying a new or onboarding an existing AVD environment, you do not have to worry about managing those machines — that is something our unique auto-scale engine will do for you. In short, it will start, stop, reboot, build new VMs from scratch, completely remove these machines when no longer needed, monitor, and repair hosts when needed, and more — all fully automated.

It will also put machines in drain mode when applicable, inform your users that something is about to happen (in your own words), and finally, it will make sure all of your machines will get a unique name (which it can reuse) while also managing the underlying computer objects in Active Directory for you.

It can do all this for hosted shared environments, published applications, non-persistent pooled desktops, and for personal assigned, persistent desktops as well. In fact, we take it one step further. You can give your users more flexibility or responsibility by letting them start, stop, and restart their own personally assigned virtual machines, and log off their sessions when desired.

Roadmap

Not too long from now stopping, (re)starting, logging of sessions, etc., will also be possible for non-persistent pooled virtual machines as well. Together with the ability for your users to resize and re-image their own virtual machines.

CLICK HERE FOR A STEP-BY-STEP OVERVIEW ON INSTALLING AND SETTING UP NERDIO MANAGER FOR ENTERPRISE. 

Onboarding & Continuing Use of Your Existing AVD Deployment

Once you are in the graphical user interface of Nerdio Manager for Enterprise, adding an existing AVD deployment is easy and will take you 2 minutes, tops. Let me show you.

First, go over to “Settings” within the left-hand side menu and select “Azure environment”. You’ll end up here – see below.

All you need to do is “Link” the network and resource group where the AVD environment is deployed into. Next, you select “Workspaces” (at the top of the left-hand menu), do a webpage refresh, and you will see the existing AVD deployment pop up almost instantly.

After that, you will go to “Associate” (you’ll see a button with this text appear), your existing Workspace or Tenant with Manager for AVD.

How long this will take depends on the number of host pools and machines in those host pools. Somewhere between 5-15 minutes on average.

That’s it, you are done.

Migrating Your AVD Deployment from Tenant to Workspace

As I am sure you all know, AVD comes in two flavors: the old, non-ARM version-based Tenants, and the new ARM version of AVD based on Workspaces.

If you are still using Tenants, we encourage you to migrate your AVD deployment from Tenants over to Workspaces with a few mouse clicks, all fully automated.

Go over to the Tenants section via the left-hand side menu and click on “Migrate to ARM” on the right-hand side, see the below image as well.

Once you’ve clicked “Migrate to ARM”, the below will appear.

Here, you will be able to select your host pool of choice (part of Tenants), including the Workspace where you want to migrate this host pool over to. Finally, choose what you want to do with the current user assignments. Think of this as host pool metadata being migrated, it will only take a few seconds.

Of course, we also enable you to migrate the underlying virtual machines part of your Tenant host pool. Click “Off” (this will turn it “On”) next to “Migrate VMs, as displayed above. Next, you can configure how you want to migrate your VMs.

First, select how many VMs you want to migrate at the same time. If it is a host pool with a dozen or more machines in it, this is a very welcome feature.

Fill in the number of failures allowed before this process will be halted.

Schedule when you want the migration to take place; during night-time, for example. Or do not schedule and execute right away.

Under messaging, you can fill in your own text. If the system runs into active user sessions while performing the migration, users will first be notified. Then, after 10 minutes,15, 30, etc.; whatever you configure from the dropdown menu, the migration will take place.

Once the migration has finished, you will find your host pool under Workspaces instead of Tenants, which is exactly what we wanted to achieve.

And there you go! A few clicks and the rest is automated for you.

Of course, there’s much more to tell and show once you’ve installed Nerdio Manager for Enterprise, and I would be more than happy to do so, though this should give you an indication of what we are capable of. Think of it as the tip of the iceberg — there’s much more where that came from.

Download Nerdio Manager for Enterprise from the Azure Marketplace today and start your free 30-day trial. Or, reach out to schedule a demo!

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Nerdio Manager for Enterprise Case Study: New York City Department of Environmental Protection

Case Study

Learn how the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYC DEP) used Nerdio Manager for Enterprise to move 2,000 employees to remote work in a matter of days–90 percent faster than it could have using VPN connections (and without the need for new hardware). 

 

About New York City Department of Environmental Protraction (NYC DEP)

New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYC DEP) is the agency responsible for moving fresh water in and storm and wastewater out. It also maintains miles of underground pipes and the ecologically rich above-ground drainage systems that naturally handle runoff precipitation from streets and sidewalks. With 9 million residents, the Big Apple is a teeming metropolis. Spread across islands and mainland, the city’s boroughs are connected by bridges, tunnels, and ferries. Moving people across this unique geography is a big enough undertaking for such a populous city. Still, an even more essential job is delivering the 1 billion gallons of fresh drinking water New York City’s residents require every day. That’s water for everything from bathing to baking world-famous bagels and pizza.

Commitment to Virtualization

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYC DEP) used Nerdio Manager for Enterprise to move roughly 2,000 employees to remote work in a matter of days—90 percent faster than it could have using VPN connections (and without the need for new hardware). NYC DEP also used Azure Active Directory Application Proxy and Azure Application Gateway to provide more secure remote access to internal applications with multi-factor authentication.

An agency with 19 business units and roughly 5,600 employees, NYC DEP’s scale and scope is huge, and its IT department must support field operations around the clock. Farhan Abdullah, Director of Production Support Services at NYC DEP, says, “Whether it’s water treatment, water supply, or sewer operations if a water main breaks day or night, the IT department is responsible for making sure apps and other resources are up, running, and available.”

To support around-the-clock operations, the IT department runs multiple data centers across the city’s five boroughs, and it continually reassesses how to provide seamless disaster recovery and broad scalability. As part of this strategy, NYC DEP was an early proponent of virtualization and cloud services, and it has stayed true to this commitment. Michael Shum, IT Chief of Staff at NYC DEP, estimates that the agency has moved 40 percent of its workloads to the cloud, with more moved there every day.

“We used Azure Virtual Desktop to provide highly secure remote access 90 percent faster, to 90 percent more employees, than we could have with our legacy systems.” – Cecil McMaster: Deputy Commissioner for Business Information Technology, New York City Department of Environmental Protection.

NYC DEP had relied on Microsoft Azure services for years, since the days of Microsoft Virtual Server. By early 2020, employees used cloud tools like Microsoft Office 365 business productivity apps, and IT staff managed identity and access with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Premium. About 2 percent of the agency’s employees worked remotely, using company-issued devices and a VPN connection to sign into an internal portal. The agency wanted more than VPN could offer—faster connection speeds, more robust scalability, and multi-factor authentication to secure employees’ credentials. 

The Shift to Remote Work

In March, when NYC DEP had to switch about a third of its employees to remote work in response to COVID-19, it saw Nerdio Manager for Enterprise as a natural choice for improving remote access because of the agency’s prior investment in Microsoft products. 

IT staff faced a challenge in bringing on 2,500 employees unaccustomed to remote work. The sudden influx of connection requests also slowed the internal portal’s performance significantly. Despite the obstacles, NYC DEP deployed Azure Virtual Desktop in a matter 
of days.

To accelerate adding user accounts on the back end, IT staff deployed Nerdio Manager for Enterprise—a service that empowers IT professionals to automate, optimize, and secure Azure Virtual Desktop deployments. This saved a significant amount of time, reducing a four-and-a-half-week task to just three hours. Nerdio also provides a centralized management interface from which IT staff can quickly troubleshoot access issues.

 “With Nerdio Manager for Enterprise, we were able to access a list of all our employees and add them with a click.”– Vic Kayharee, Cloud Engineer for the Business Information Technology at NYC DEP.

Cecil McMaster, Deputy Commissioner for Business Information Technology at NYC DEP, says, “If we’d had to provide remote access strictly through VPN connections to on-premises resources, we would only have been able to offer maybe one-tenth of the access and performance. We used Azure Virtual Desktop to provide highly secure remote access 90 percent faster, to 90 percent more employees, than we could have with our legacy systems.  Having a dynamic virtual infrastructure that we can configure without having to procure hardware or worry about storage and memory gives us flexibility.”

If we need to add another 50 people, we can do that by clicking a button. – Cecil McMaster, Deputy Commissioner for Business Information Technology at NYC DEP.

Improved Capabilities with Some Help From IT Partners

Using remote, highly secure Microsoft data centers, NYC DEP provides IT infrastructure resiliency and scalability faster to support its employees. Shum says, “We can stand up a new application with Azure services in 90 days versus one to two years, because we don’t have to go buy a server. We no longer have to put in a requisition to get the capital, or worry about government budget cycles, where you’re budgeting a year out.” 

NYC DEP credits support from Microsoft and Nerdio Manager for Enterprise with helping it get through a demanding transition period. Shum says, “I give kudos to Microsoft and Nerdio for supporting us nights, days, and weekends as we moved to remote work. Their investment in us, in this collaboration, got us to the point where we felt comfortable with the Azure Virtual Desktop solution. Getting this project done during COVID-19 was hectic, but we got through it together.”

Remote Work With Greater Scalability, Flexibility, and Security

With VPN, the agency relied on antivirus software installed on employee computers. But, says Shum, “With Azure Virtual Desktop, we manage the antivirus software ourselves, so we can ensure compliance and keep devices updated—as opposed to making sure every single endpoint has the most current protections installed.”

NYC DEP appreciates that employees now have the flexibility of using their personal devices to remotely connect to agency resources, regardless of operating system or endpoint security software. As McMaster points out, agency-secured laptops are scarce due to sudden demand, and many agencies across the country can’t offer remote work options due to device sourcing issues.

Azure Virtual Desktop also supports the agency’s security needs. Abdullah says, “We are comfortable making legacy on-premises apps available through Azure because we can apply Azure AD conditional access policies based on location, device, time of the day, and so on, along with multi-factor authentication.” 

IT staff use Windows 10 multi-session with Azure NetApp files to create roaming profiles with Azure Virtual Desktop. With Windows 10 multi-session, they can deliver a full, scalable Windows 10 desktop experience with virtualized Microsoft 365 apps that run in multi-user scenarios, without needing any additional gateway servers. Kayharee says, “We can publish as many host pools as we need to accommodate our workloads. We only need 21 hosts for about 1,000 employees, instead of procuring a machine for each individual. And in terms of security, we only have to manage 21 hosts to make sure they have the latest security 
updates installed.”

Sharing Lessons Learned and Looking Toward the Future

Today, NYC DEP is getting requests from fellow agencies around the country to share its success story. As of December 2020, a handful of agencies have started using NYC DEP’s suggested best practices and planning approaches.

Abdullah says the experience of taking advantage of the latest features in Azure Virtual Desktop, like faster deployment capabilities, simplified management, and improved security, inspired NYC DEP to consider replacing its desktop computers with a virtual environment. That way, employees will have the same desktop experience whether they work on-premises or remotely. Next, the agency plans to use Azure Log Analytics for native monitoring and alerting, instead of PowerShell commands, and Azure AD Groups to grant access. This will allow NYC DEP to streamline user access based on groups rather than a per-user basis. 

“We can stand up a new application with Azure services in 90 days versus one to two years, because we don’t have to go buy a server. We no longer have to put in a requisition to get the capital.” – Michael Shum: IT Chief of Staff, New York City Department of Environmental Protection.

Download the application today from the Azure marketplace and begin a free 30-day trial: nerdio.co/nmw. 

DOWNLOAD THE CASE STUDY HERE

Find Nerdio in the Azure Marketplace: nerdio.co/nmw