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How VMware, IGEL, Microsoft are a Great Combination for DaaS

How VMware, IGEL, Microsoft are a Great Combination for DaaS

I’ll let you into a secret – there seems to be a solution stack that is really taking off right now. Through conversations with customers, EUC ecosystem vendors, and partners, a triad of vendors is making it easier than ever to embrace DaaS or upgrade existing VDI solutions. That triad is made up Microsoft, VMware, and IGEL.

VMware

VMware Horizon needs no introduction. With support for workloads that sit on vSphere (both on-premises and in the cloud) and natively in Microsoft Azure, it has been tried and trusted by the global market as one of the premier virtual app and desktop platforms. With literally millions of individual users world-wide, from critical hospital deployments and CAD engineers working on the next generation of aircraft, all the way to remote workers, VMware Horizon has been pivotal in keeping the global economy going.

Azure

The Microsoft Azure platform has grown at a phenomenal rate. By tying together all of an organization’s productivity tools with a best-of-breed IaaS platform, it is a top choice for organizations to migrate to and grow. With multiple options for deploying VMware Horizon virtual desktops and apps — including Azure VMware Solution and Azure Virtual Desktop, which includes features like multi-session Windows 10 and Windows 11 — enterprise IT teams often look to Azure as the foundation when they are tasked with innovating in the end-user computing space.

IGEL

Finally, when it comes to the endpoint, there is a choice that has been rapidly gaining market share over the past couple of years – IGEL. IGEL is one of the only purpose-built enterprise-ready OS platforms for connecting to the Digital Workspace. For organizations looking for a more secure, consistent base to connect to their workspace — whether that is DaaS, SaaS, or any mixture of applications — IGEL makes it happen.

When you bring these three solutions together, something incredible happens.

Examples from the field

Don’t take our word for it. We have plenty of examples where a joint VMware, Microsoft, and IGEL solution have delivered outstanding outcomes for our customers.

Cost Efficiency

A leading equipment manufacturer was looking to enable hybrid working for their staff. Faced with an aging PC estate and the need to move to a modern Windows OS for their applications, they selected VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure as their solution of choice.

This would give them the agility to migrate to a solution that could be deployed to not only home workers, but also those workers who needed to get to multiple remote global sites. Horizon would give them a great VDI broker with a leading protocol and industry-leading application deployment capabilities, while Azure meant that they could put this solution wherever they needed it to be without having the huge upfront cost of purchasing server hardware.

Next, they started looking at modernizing their endpoint estate. Part of their requirement was to be able to use CAD software and Microsoft Teams, and it quickly became clear that replacing thousands of desktops was going to cost a lot more than initially expected, potentially threatening the feasibility of the whole project.

At this point, the VMware account team suggested that the customer consider IGEL for repurposing their endpoint estate. Using IGEL, and leveraging VMware Horizon’s capabilities with Teams optimization and rich graphics acceleration, the vast majority of that PC estate could be retained, instead running IGEL OS rather than older versions of Windows. The combined cost savings of not having to purchase new PCs, along with the reduced power costs of running a more efficient OS and avoiding device recycling costs meant that the overall project cost was now much lower, with the entire project cost being much closer to the budget originally set aside for just replacing their PC estate.

Ease of Management

When a large airline wanted to embrace a rock-solid application delivery platform, they knew which solution they preferred to deliver it.

The solution had to be reliable and trusted, while offering an excellent end-user experience. They chose VMware Horizon on Azure VMware Solution (AVS). Selecting AVS gave them the ability to move their VMware vSphere workloads seamlessly between their on-premises datacenters and Azure and an easy mechanism to extend their private datacenter to the public cloud.

For their endpoints, again, only one solution fit the bill – IGEL. With IGEL OS and its industry-leading endpoint management solution, it was simple to build an endpoint estate that could bring disparate devices together under a single, unified management plane.

Along with this manageability, IGEL OS is built from the ground up to be a more secure and reliable platform. Real-time policy updates for endpoints both on and off the corporate LAN mean that no matter where a device is globally, or which network it’s on, full visibility and configuration management is always at hand.

Security

A ransomware attack isn’t just a one-off attack. It can take days, weeks, or in some cases months to recover data and get access back into systems. In a healthcare environment, losing access to systems for a sustained period just isn’t an option.

There have been multiple very public cases of healthcare organizations falling victim to ransomware attacks and having to cancel critical operations and procedures while they struggle to recover access to their IT systems.

One large healthcare organization decided that they simply couldn’t take the risk of losing access to their systems. They decided to be proactive and secure the biggest attack vector for ransomware attacks – their endpoints.

They chose to move their end-user workloads off their physical endpoints and into a public cloud. They selected VMware Horizon 8 on Microsoft Azure VMware Solution. If the worst did happen, they could shut down large swathes of their end-user estate and restore them from backups or rebuild them much quicker than in a standard Windows-based desktop estate.

How about the endpoints themselves though? To reduce their attack surface as much as possible, the healthcare provider selected IGEL as their endpoint platform.

The IGEL platform has been designed with security at its core. With a read-only OS, real-time configuration management, and encryption as standard, the chances of compromise are drastically reduced. Coupled with VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure, those malicious actors set on exploiting insecure environments need to look elsewhere.

Summary

With so many different end-user products in the market, it can be difficult to select technology solutions that fit together and resolve challenges across different use cases. The partnership between VMware, Microsoft, and IGEL is a solution that makes sense time and time again.

The evidence is clear. Whether you want to make your new DaaS solution financially viable, easily manage endpoints across locations and networks, or protect against threats, this combined solution has been tried and tested and is trusted by some of the world’s largest enterprises.

To learn more, visit our VMware page.

Ben Ward

Sr. Pre-sales Engineer
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