Virtual and Remote Desktop.
Work on your Desktop anywhere, from any device.
Additional Expertise
Working with SMBs for many years has taught us this truth - one size doesn't fit all. Our clients all have different technology needs and goals, and it's our job to realize them.
Virtual and Remote Desktop solutions from Latitudes will allow your business to extend a company managed desktop to any of your staff, from any location.
Our Virtual and Remote Desktop Solutions provide businesses and end users with secure, anytime, anywhere access to all their corporate applications and data, from virtually any computing device.
As businesses everywhere are looking for smarter and more efficient ways to work, more and more are turning to remote and virtual desktop computing as a way of empowering their organization. End users can be given unparalleled flexibility in accessing company data and services, while compliance and security concerns are met with a fully centralized and scalable architecture.
KEY BENEFITS
USER PRODUCTIVITY
Enables higher user productivity by offering access to a familiar desktop from multiple devices and locations. Empowers users with secure access to corporate data and applications from most devices, including personal computers, tablets and smartphones. Enabling bring your own devices (BYOD) without compromising user experience or security.
SOLUTION FLEXIBILITY
The solution will scale to meet your company's needs, whether that's remote access for key users or the entire business workforce. Leverage the 'on demand' computing and pricing of the cloud with minimal hardware costs.
REDUCED SUPPORT AND HARDWARE COSTS
A centrally managed virtual desktop architecture will reduce administrative overhead, standardize and speed up application deployments and reduce PC hardware costs.
What is a Virtual or Remote Desktop?
Although distinct technologies in their own right, Virtual Desktop and Remote Desktop have many similarities from a technical and deliverable perspective. Fundamentally, both technologies allow businesses to remotely 'deliver' a desktop experience to their end users, including all the applications they use, business software, access to their data shares - everything they would normally have on their local PC. The difference is that all the computing power, software and data is not located on their PC anymore, but centrally managed and processed on a server.
This may not seem like a huge difference, but leveraged correctly could present massive benefits to your company in terms of technology spend, flexible staff working, security, administrative overhead, disaster recovery, hardware costs and more.
Consider the following:
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The device that connects to the remote or virtual desktop is no longer storing or processing company data. It does not need to have any applications installed on it, does not need to be particularly powerful, or in fact even a PC at all. A tablet or smartphone could easily do the job.
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The connecting device never holds any company data and is not directly connected to the company network. This creates a secure barrier between the connecting device and the corporate network, meaning 'bring your own device' is a lot more manageable and secure, at the same time as company data is always centrally stored, not scattered among users' devices.
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The only actual data that moves between the centralized platform performing the computing, and the end device that the user connects from is keystrokes, mouse movements, video and audio. This means that the bandwidth requirements for a good connection to the system are really low, making the technology ideal for remote working using modest home Internet speeds.
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Applications and data are centrally managed from a server infrastructure. This means that all desktops environments, applications and software, patching, anti-virus are all managed from one location. This vastly reduces administrative overhead and support costs, as you are not maintaining a distributed software architecture among a desktop fleet.
As you can see, desktop virtualization is a powerful option for businesses to optimize resources, provide mobility solutions and deliver a higher level of performance to end users.
Virtual Desktop vs Remote Desktop - Which is better for you?
To better address this question, we first have to take a closer look at the two technologies and how they function slightly differently from each other.
VIRTUAL DESKTOP
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) involves running user desktop PCs as virtual machines within a hosted platform, such as a data center or the public cloud. In a VDI environment, it is most common to have each user allotted a dedicated virtual machine PC which will run a separate and independent operating system such as Windows 8 or 10. As each user enjoys a dedicated virtual PC, they can install or uninstall applications, be granted administrative rights over their virtual PC and generally use it as they would a more traditional PC. This one to one relationship between the user and their virtual PC offers a lot of end user flexibility and autonomy.
REMOTE DESKTOP
Remote Desktop Services (RDS) is a proprietary Microsoft system, and allows a single server to host many desktop 'sessions' simultaneously. Although these desktop sessions give the appearance of being fully independent from each other, they are all running from a single server operating system instance. This means that all users share the same set of software that is installed on the server, as well as the operating system itself. As the server is not dedicated to one user, precautions much be taken to limit administrative privileges for things such as storing personal data and installing software, as this will have an effect on other users of the system. This one to many relationship means a much lower administrative overhead and greater administrative control.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Making a choice between whether VDI or RDS is the better fit for your business can be difficult, but both systems do share a lot of the same technical infrastructure, so is not uncommon for businesses to move between the solutions, or even run both if the circumstances make it beneficial.
We'd love to talk to you in depth about what both have to offer, and what may be the right technology for your business.
Move your Desktop Computing to the Cloud Today.
Find out more about Virtual and Remote Desktop solutions from Latitudes.
Whether you want to move your desktop fleet to the cloud as part of a bigger strategic move, or are considering expanding your company's IT flexibility, we'd love to speak to you about how Desktop virtualization can help.
Contact us today.
