The world of consumption has changed to everything as a service. Be it the way we consume movies and music to our office productivity tools, personal data storage, health and wellness, even our day-to-day shopping experience for consumer goods. The evolution of technology played a huge role in this. People no longer download songs or movies, nor do we buy CDs and DVDs for our personal entertainment. Rather we are now in a world where OTT (Over the Top) has become the default. The usefulness and power of as a service not only changed entertainment but also the way we work, and the tools used for office productivity.
There are well known advantages of the “as a service” model. It reduces upfront capital expenditure, saves time and adds purchasing flexibility. It also makes it easy to try new products and services and leads to predictable costs. It’s no wonder this model has been widely adopted across so many industries!
Along similar lines, how we use our personal desktops and devices has changed. We’ve moved away from individual desktop workstations and towards virtual desktops and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Gone are the days when employees were assigned to computer desktops at a particular physical location. Fast evolving technology in the VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) space transformed the industry and helped materialize the vision of remote desktops.
Times have continued to change, especially with the wide adoption of remote/hybrid work after COVID-19 arrived. The first generation VDI is becoming obsolete. VDI set the stage for this transformation journey but there are some critical challenges with traditional VDI deployments. With everything moving to the cloud, now customers and users are asking how they can access their desktops and applications from the cloud rather than from an on-prem location.
Some of the critical components that make a traditional VDI deployment hard to implement and manage are:
- Infrastructure cost
- Optimization and performance tuning
- Monitoring and security
- Data management, storage and backups
- Application availability and updates
- Expert reliable support
Spot PC, a market leading cloud desktop solution from Spot by NetApp, aims to address all of these challenges imposed by traditional VDI. Spot PC is cloud native, meaning desktops are running in the cloud for their entire lifecycle. It is a continuously optimized cloud desktop solution that runs on Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365, managed by a dedicated Spot PC team at NetApp. It is simple to deploy, scale and secure.
Some of the key features of Spot PC are:
- Managed cloud desktops for every use case – Spot PC delivers native cloud desktops based on Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365. The desktop choices address a variety of workloads from personal VMs for knowledge and engineering work to GPU enabled workstations that support heavy graphics applications.
- Enhanced Security and Protection – Spot PC includes Microsoft Defender for Cloud with enhanced malware protection which gives Spot PC administrators complete visibility of the security posture of their cloud desktops infrastructure. Security is enhanced by integration with enterprise identity and authentication management. Automatic backups along with real-time restore capabilities ensure data integrity and in-tenant data residency.
- Automation and Observability – Scalable, rapid onboarding and deployment automation and image lifecycle management reduces administration time. Cross-tenant visibility into session server health and user session performance reduces support burdens and decreases time to problem resolution.
- Predicable costs – Spot PC is a managed service with Tier 2/ Tier 3 support all for a fixed cost per user per month.
Spot PC is available today through Microsoft Azure Marketplace (for MSPs) and also by contacting the Spot PC team. To learn more, please visit the Spot PC website.