As cloud adoption continues, Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) has become an increasingly popular, enterprise-grade alternative to legacy VDI providers, such as Citrix and VMware. However, moving your desktops to Azure is a massive undertaking—it should be carefully considered and planned to ensure a smooth migration and optimal performance.
Moving to AVD can be a significant investment in time and budget, so it is important to weigh both operational and technical considerations to make sure the timing is right and that your organization is set up to succeed. You’ll need to look at everything from how familiar you are with Microsoft’s offerings to the advantages and limitations of a service-based model for your organization.
Once you determine that Azure Virtual Desktop is the right fit and that the timing is good for your organization, there are five questions you need to answer to make informed decisions and leverage the full potential of cloud-based desktop environments.
1. How will you implement the new environment?
You’ll need to start mapping out how you’ll implement the new environment. Any move from on-premises to the cloud starts with taking stock of your current environment and how that will translate to Azure:
- Scope: Some environments are complete overhauls of existing VDI, while others may include just a small use case. Every scenario demands careful planning and a strong foundation that can support both short- and long-term needs.
- Execution: This could be an internal endeavor, but you may also need an external partner(s) for some or all aspects of the deployment.
- Rollout phases: Many organizations take a crawl/walk/run approach starting with proof of concept (POC), then a pilot group, and finally a large-scale rollout. Other organizations may test the waters with a specific use case to master AVD and expand from there.
- Project leadership: Different stakeholders may need to be involved, including individuals from the cloud team, end user computing (EUC) group, security, and more. Some organizations assign a project manager to own the overall initiative.
- Timing: Renewals and hardware refreshes may create a hard deadline, but there may be other timing factors, such as specific business needs or M&A activity, to consider.
2. What level of investment is required?
Like any shift to a new environment, moving to Azure Virtual Desktop will require a significant investment. As you evaluate the ROI of moving to AVD, be sure to consider costs, such as licensing and hardware as well as deployment and ongoing costs:
- Network: Determine if any changes to your network(s) or firewalls will require further investment.
- Personnel: A staff well-versed in Azure and EUC may require little additional training to successfully implement and manage Azure Virtual Desktop. However, if your team’s background lies primarily in legacy software, they’ll likely require significant training and certifications.
- Partners: Some organizations may require outside assistance to set up, manage the project, and train their teams. There may even be a need for a third-party managed service provider to continue to manage operations beyond deployment.
- Migration: There will be additional migration costs for applications and data, plus duplicative costs during any overlap periods between existing VDI licensing and the move to AVD.
- Consumption: Unlike on-premises VDI options with predictable costs, Azure Virtual Desktop is a consumption-based service. While this can lead to a lower total cost of ownership, it also requires greater visibility to achieve optimal ROI.
3. How will you handle security?
For Azure Virtual Desktop, security revolves around the Azure environment and endpoints for both end users and administrators:
- Directory and identity management: The most popular option is Microsoft Entra ID (previously Azure Active Directory), but there are several variations of the product, so you’ll want to be conscientious of the security implications of each.
- Authentication: For mixed personas (e.g. third-party contractors vs. employees), you may need to consider different levels of authentication.
- Conditional access: Having conditional access is optional, but important for complex, global organizations with different use cases, personas, and applications.
- Role-based access control (RBAC): From a management standpoint, the ability to limit access to particular functions can be powerful.
- Locking down desktops: There may be a need to prevent certain functionalities on remote desktops, such as printing, screen capture, et cetera.
- New user deployment: Some processes can be automated during deployment to reduce future security risks. Ensure your team utilizes automation when possible to harden your defenses.
- Provider access: Understanding the level of access you grant to a cloud provider, third parties, or contractors is often overlooked and can create vulnerabilities.
- Endpoint solution: While virtual desktops can be set up as disposable desktops, endpoint protection is critical for a holistic security posture.
4. What will the end-user experience look like?
End users will not tolerate anything less than a comparable, if not better, option than their on-premises desktop experience. And while your Help Desk and C-suite want to avoid any friction for users, high performance can be costly, complex, and resource-hungry. Ensuring a seamless experience depends on a number of factors:
- Use cases and personas: Many organizations start their Azure Virtual Desktop journey with a particular use case and then expand from there. Defining personas associated with each use case is a best practice you’ll need to adopt.
- Desktop type: A hallmark of AVD is its ability to support different types of desktops. There are personal desktops which are dedicated to a particular user and pooled desktops which share resources among groups of users.
- Necessary applications: Different end-user experiences and use cases associated with personas will require different applications. Having the ability to define a suite of applications and deliver it to a specific persona enables an optimal experience.
- Application delivery: Having a defined methodology for app delivery is important for large-scale deployments, particularly as organizations scale and add use cases, regions, and functional groups.
- Endpoints: What kind of endpoints will you use? What client will you use? Organizations need to understand the different options they need to support and manage.
- Monitoring and troubleshooting: The ability to troubleshoot any blips will be paramount to large-scale user adoption and acceptance. Visibility into end-user issues can help pinpoint problems and identify the causes.
- Optimization: There are several proactive initiatives IT departments can use to optimize performance including proper architectural design, secure networking, resource right-sizing, and best practices for balancing performance and cost.
5. How are you going to manage the environment?
Once your environment is deployed, you will need to quickly pivot to ongoing support and operations. Azure Virtual Desktop management grows increasingly complicated for organizations with different user personas, global workforces, and seasonality changes, so you’ll need to determine how that will be tackled and by whom.
Organizations may choose to have an internal IT team own management of the platform or outsource to an external service provider. While using a third party reduces the burden on your team, those hours add up quickly and create added costs. At the same time, if you decide to manage AVD in-house, the native tools provided by Microsoft can be overly complex and require very specific domain expertise.
By leveraging a solution, such as Nerdio Manager, you can maximize the power of your internal team and streamline common management tasks, including:
- Images: Companies that run VDI at scale understand that the demand for deploying and updating different images is a never-ending task. Nerdio enables IT to easily create, manage, update, and patch images.
- Different desktops: For heterogeneous desktop environments, Nerdio gives the ability to control multiple virtual desktop offerings in a single pane of glass.
- Scripts: Nerdio provides tested, continuously updated scripts so your team doesn’t have to write and maintain these themselves.
- Optimization: Nerdio’s Auto-Scaling feature allows IT to recognize significant cost savings by optimizing compute and storage resources. At the same time, the platform ensures you always have enough compute and storage resources available to deliver top performance to end users.
Transitioning to Azure Virtual Desktop can seem overwhelming—but the transformative benefits the platform offers far outweigh the risks.
With Nerdio Manager, you can take full advantage of Azure Virtual Desktop’s offerings while streamlining not only management, but also planning, deployment, and more to modernize your IT infrastructure.
Interested in learning more about how long a migration might take for your organization with Nerdio? Check out our estimated migration timelines in this PDF.
