As more organizations embrace cloud computing models, migrating virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to the cloud becomes increasingly compelling. With the move to a Modern Workplace, organizations can offload the complexities of on-premises VDI management to a public or private cloud service provider and unlock benefits, such as increased scalability, optimized costs, and reduced IT resource constraints.
However, a cloud VDI/DaaS transformation requires careful planning and strategic decision-making. There are critical steps to take when considering a cloud migration to ensure a smooth transition, mitigate risk, and set your organization up for long-term success.
1. Evaluate cloud readiness
Before diving in, IT leaders must objectively assess their organization’s cloud readiness across multiple dimensions.
The first step is assessing the current state of your on-premises VDI environment, including hardware age and capacity. You need to identify any potential issues with virtualizing legacy apps or OS instances. It’s crucial to understand application dependencies and compatibility with cloud platforms, as these applications are essential tools for employee productivity.
Next, ensure adequate internet bandwidth for cloud desktop access and evaluate options for secure remote connectivity, such as migrating to a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) to optimize performance. To ensure security and compliance, review regulatory requirements around data sovereignty and privacy, assess identity and access management processes for cloud integration, and determine if your cloud provider’s security certifications meet your organization’s standards.
You will also need to gauge operations: Do you have the right internal skillsets or will cloud training be needed, what change management will you need to drive user adoption, and is the company ready to transition from CAPEX to OPEX spending?
This comprehensive readiness assessment will reveal potential roadblocks, bottlenecks, skill gaps, and areas requiring remediation before a cloud migration, ensuring you have a realistic view of prerequisites.
2. Define a cloud strategy for your business
Understanding your cloud readiness posture allows you to define the strategic objectives and priorities driving your VDI/DaaS transformation. Businesses often have three classic motivations for cloud transformation–cost optimization and savings, hardware refresh, and agreement renewals.
While valid, these motivations can be short-sighted. Businesses need to recognize the long-term value and endless possibilities that cloud technology can provide. The cloud serves as a critical foundation for the digital transformation journey, offering agility and establishing a base for future-fit technology that allows for adaptivity, innovation, creativity, and resilience.
Among its key benefits, the cloud offers:
- Cost optimization: Reduce capital expenditures on VDI infrastructure refreshes, leverage cloud elasticity to better align costs with demand, and shift to a predictable operating expense model.
- Scalability and flexibility: Rapidly provision/de-provision VDI capacity to meet evolving needs, leverage global cloud data centers for desktop services anywhere, and enable elastic hybrid cloud architecture for bursting.
- Focus on core competencies: Offload VDI stack maintenance with automation tools, redeploy IT personnel to more strategic, value-add initiatives, and accelerate the delivery of new desktop services and capabilities
- Business continuity and resilience: Improve reliability through geo-redundant cloud infrastructure, enable seamless failover across availability zones/regions, and leverage advanced backup and disaster recovery capabilities from cloud providers.
These drivers will shape your optimal cloud strategy, inform architecture decisions, and help prioritize migration goals, whether focusing on rapid desktop standup or minimizing costs.
Cloud VDI/DaaS transformations often serve as catalysts for modernizing legacy systems and migrating to more cloud-optimized architectures. Therefore, controlling the application portfolio is critical when defining your cloud strategy. Identifying the ideal future desktop delivery model and developing a roadmap to transition applications and desktop images accordingly is a vital step. There are several common versions of application migration strategies—most have five, six, or seven alternatives.
3. Select a cloud deployment model
With your cloud readiness and strategy mapped, the next key decision is selecting the optimal cloud deployment model for your VDI/DaaS environment. There are several options to consider:
Public cloud VDI/DaaS: In this fully outsourced model, the entire VDI/DaaS stack is operated by the cloud provider. It features a simple subscription/consumption billing model based on usage, rapid scalability, and limited management overhead for IT.
Private cloud/hosted VDI/DaaS: In this model, the VDI infrastructure is hosted in a dedicated cloud environment. Organizations retain access control and configuration management, offering a potentially tighter security posture and regulatory compliance.
Hybrid cloud: This approach keeps portions of VDI on-premises while integrating with public cloud VDI/DaaS. While ideal for global load balancing and cloud bursting, it comes with increased complexity but offers the flexibility to gradually transition workloads.
The right model depends on your priorities around cost, scalability needs, security requirements, management control, and the cultural and operational skillsets of your organization.
4. Implement cloud security controls
Security consideration is paramount given the dynamic, externalized nature of cloud VDI architectures. Many organizations aim for a zero-trust framework, which is not a specific product or service but a strategy and mindset for security.
Key zero-trust security areas to focus on include:
Identity and access management: Implement centralized authentication via cloud identity providers, integrate with identity governance tools for access reviews, and enforce multi-factor authentication for all virtual desktop access.
Data protection: Encrypt data at rest and in transit using cloud-native tools, leverage Information Rights Management (IRM) for document and data controls, and ensure compliance with data residency and sovereignty policies.
Monitoring and analytics: Gain visibility into user and entity activity through centralized logging, implement security analytics and user behavior monitoring, and automate threat detection and response processes.
Governance and compliance: Continuously audit and assess security posture using cloud tools, define security baseline policies and enforce them across the cloud VDI/DaaS estate, and streamline compliance management for regulations, such as HIPAA and GDPR.
When your organization plans for ongoing security operations, you reduce the risk of human error and enhance the overall security of your cloud environment.
5. Design for operational excellence
One of the key success factors for a cloud VDI/DaaS solution is designing it for efficient, automated operation from the start. Implementing auto-scaling and load balancing enables the elasticity to dynamically provision and de-provision VDI/DaaS capacity. By automating vertical and horizontal scaling based on demand signals and leveraging cloud load balancing, you can achieve optimized global performance.
Unified cloud-native management is essential, using native cloud tools to centralize the management of the VDI/DaaS estate. This reduces reliance on disparate on-premises monitoring tools and unlocks granular logging and auto-healing/remediation capabilities.
Automating deployments and updates with infrastructure as code allows for full-stack VDI/DaaS deployments, automated patching, app updates, and configuration management based on policy and rules. Implementing CI/CD pipelines facilitates automated validation and self-healing processes.
Additionally, adopting DevOps/SRE operating models is crucial to breaking down operational silos between endpoint, cloud, and app teams. Establishing Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and clearly defined escalation paths fosters a culture of automation, monitoring, analytics, and continuous improvement. The cloud’s inherently programmable nature enables unprecedented levels of VDI/DaaS operational automation, but IT teams must transform processes and skills to capitalize on this potential.
6. Effectively manage cloud costs for better ROI
While cloud VDI can lower infrastructure costs, inefficient consumption or lack of controls can rapidly inflate spending. To mitigate this, establish self-service cloud centers by creating a centralized self-service catalog for requesting VDI/DaaS resources. Enable automated governance by defining policies and guardrails, and enforce boot policies, runtime limits, and auto-suspend/shutdown features.
Ensure your team leverages cloud purchase models by considering reserved instance purchases for consistent workloads or a mix of pay-as-you-go and reserved instances to optimize costs. Take advantage of spot/preemptible instances for variable peak loads, review licenses for cloud-friendly models, and choose the right cloud solutions (VDI vs. DaaS) based on the use cases discovered during the assessment phase.
Always implement cost optimization processes by enabling cloud monitoring and utilization analytics to identify and eliminate wasteful spending, such as idle resources and excess storage. Use cost allocation for different business and professional areas, down to host pools and workloads, to demonstrate current costs versus potential savings, thereby driving accountability. Ensure RBAC support and use a unified tool for the whole organization.
Additionally, design for elastic disposability by building cloud VDI/DaaS workloads as ephemerally disposable resources, minimizing the persistent data footprint on desktops, and taking advantage of immutable, rebuildable infrastructure. Proactively managing cloud consumption and adhering to financial governance practices is critical to avoiding cloud cost overruns.
Conclusion
Migrating your existing virtual desktop infrastructure to the cloud is an intricate journey requiring meticulous planning and strategic execution. Every decision profoundly impacts outcomes, including thoroughly evaluating cloud readiness, defining objectives, selecting deployment models, and architecting for security and operational excellence.
Are you looking for ways to smoothly transition and reduce risk in upcoming cloud migration projects? Learn how Nerdio Manager for Enterprise can help.
