Modernise Legacy Applications with Azure Virtual Desktop
Working from home offers organisations and employees flexibility in how and where to work. This gives freedom, but also raises challenges. How do you make sure employees have access to the same applications and systems from home? This is already possible with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. Yet, many organisations still have legacy applications on local servers, which are not available for employees at home.
Get started safely with Azure Virtual Desktop
If we are increasingly working according to the Modern Workplace principle of ‘work anywhere, anytime and from any device’, it is difficult to align legacy applications with modernised applications and systems. Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is the answer to these challenges. Azure Virtual Desktop is a virtualisation service of Microsoft for desktops and applications that run in Azure. With Azure Virtual Desktop, you can easily;
- Always access applications and desktops from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection;
- Publish and manage legacy applications;
- Set up multiple sessions within a Azure Virtual Desktop environment;
- Enable access via various operating systems (OS);
- Safeguard security of applications and desktops in accordance with the latest security tools.
Since AVD is owned by Microsoft and hosted in Azure, it is fully compatible with Microsoft 365. This means you can use existing Microsoft 365 licences, applications and data within the AVD environment, which can be very beneficial financially.
The benefits of Azure Virtual Desktop
Azure Virtual Desktop is highly cost effective compared to scaling up the traditional virtual desktop environment in your own data centre. In particular, organisations that already use a Microsoft system, such as Windows 10 or Microsoft 365, can benefit from the transition to Azure Virtual Desktop.
In addition, as an organisation with Azure Virtual Desktop, you can manage apps and data while your employees have access to these sources from their own devices. Indeed, the traditional VDI or RDS environment also offer this, but the cost reduction of AVD in combination with the advanced security that Azure offers, creates a winning formula.
Since your legacy application is installed on a specific desktop, the application works exactly as you would expect, except that you can now ‘take it with you’, wherever you go. The desktop or remote app is secured with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Azure constantly makes back-ups and the content is encapsulated, which means that data can never leave the desktop environment unless that is the explicit intention. Thanks to the combination with the Modern Workplace, you ensure that your AVD environment is seamlessly integrated, so even your employees don’t notice that they are not working from a local server.
With regard to administration, the IT department can rest assured. As a DaaS solution (Desktop-as-a-Service), Microsoft offers the benefit that, compared to a traditional VDI solution, administration matters such as load balancing, compute and storage are now in the hands of Microsoft, instead of the IT department. Only the session hosts remain under own administration. This way, the IT department can focus on its core business activities.
The big benefit of Azure Virtual Desktop is that employees can access a legacy application from any location, with their own device, in a user-friendly and secured environment. This means less travel and the possibility for them to carry out their daily tasks remotely.
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