Covid-19 forced businesses all around the world to adapt to remote working and restructure how they do business. Many businesses turned to ‘virtual desktops’ as a most preferred and cost-effective option to enable secure remote working for their employees.
Virtual Desktop (aka DaaS) is nothing but a desktop that is hosted in the cloud. It works and behaves just like a traditional desktop that you use every day at your workplace. Only difference is that it is in the cloud, which enables you to securely access all your applications and corporate data from anywhere from any device.
Additionally, it makes it easy for IT staff to implement BYOD policy with virtual desktops. Employees don’t need to worry about hardware specs or storage space of their personal devices, nor do they have to install a large number of software.
One of the most popular desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solutions that businesses of any size can opt for today is ‘Azure Virtual Desktop’ from Microsoft.
What is Azure Virtual Desktop (formerly Windows Virtual Desktop)?
It’s a fully managed cloud desktop on Azure Cloud by Microsoft that allows your employees to securely access all your organisation’s applications, services, networks and enterprise data for any device, for anywhere.
What makes Azure Virtual Desktop different from the rest?
Unlike other virtual desktops, setting up and managing AVD is relatively simple and easy. Also, it’s quite flexible, easy to scale and affordable for all businesses.
How does Azure Virtual Desktop work?
The virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), including broker, gateway, load balancer and diagnostics, is managed by Azure Virtual Desktop. You only need to focus on your virtual desktop and apps, and any policies you need for governance.
What is the difference between Azure Virtual Desktop and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure?
Microsoft provided virtual desktops are not dependent on a single location or services and are globally scalable. What this means is that you don’t need to worry about the virtual desktop server failing as Azure will automatically fail you over to a different system.
What is the difference between Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365?
Windows 365 (W365) and Azure Virtual Desktop are both desktop-as-a-service solutions from Microsoft. Windows 365 is a cloud-based service that automatically creates a new type of Windows virtual machine (Cloud PCs) for your end users.
Windows 365 is more affordable, with a large range of capabilities and optimised for simplicity, whereas Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) offers more powerful features and higher availability that is optimised for flexibility.
Which operating systems does Azure Virtual Desktop support?
It supports Windows 10 multi-session, Windows 10 single-session, Windows 7 single-session, Windows Server 2012 R2 and newer operating systems.
What are the key benefits of Azure Virtual Desktop?
- Access corporate apps, services from any device, anytime
- Centralised management & control
- Easy to scale up & down on-demand
- Superior user experience
- Easy & faster deployment
- Only pay for what you use
Is Azure Virtual Desktop Iaas or PaaS?
Azure Virtual Desktop is a PaaS offering managed by Microsoft that allows administrators to configure, deploy, manage and scale Windows Desktops and Apps on Azure.
How to install Azure Virtual Desktop?
You can follow along with this documentation from Microsoft to learn more about Azure Virtual Desktop, prerequisites, how to set up AVD along with troubleshooting tips. Alternatively, you can hire an experienced managed IT services company like Tech Results that offers full managed AVD services right from design, installation, configuration and management of your AVD / WVD environment.
What licence is needed for Azure Virtual Desktop?
We can manage and provide your Microsoft 365 licences, Microsoft licensing is complicated and our tools ensure that we keep the costs as low as possible. Depending on the size of the business it may be more cost effective to use bundled or individual licences.
If you are looking for fully managed azure virtual desktop services for your business, please call our AVD experts at 020 3138711 or email at contact@techresults.co.uk.