This blog was originally posted by Microsoft MVP Theresa Miller to her blog, 24×7 IT Connection. Organizations are migrating their desktops to the cloud as a long-term future state and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is a common implementation choice. Technology migrations can be complex to plan and execute on. Today let’s look more closely at some common AVD use case scenarios and then dive into the top 4 best practices for a successful migration to AVD.

IaC (Infrastructure-as-Code) is becoming ubiquitous in the EUC (End User Computing) community and within the datacenter. Automation and declarative infrastructure for on-premises VDI and cloud digital workspaces, such as Microsoft AVD (Azure Virtual Desktop) or AWS WorkSpaces, is now mainstream. Vendors such as Citrix now advocate the use of technologies such as Terraform and Ansible for deployments.

In today’s world of flexible work, technology has to be one thing above all else: versatile. A decade ago, virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) wouldn’t have been able to meet this moment – VDI used to be too narrow and restricted in terms of what use cases it could service. Fortunately, VDI has evolved dramatically since those days. Now, with the right resources, there’s very little you can’t accomplish through virtual desktops.

Back in 2007, when the VMware team was outlining the benefits of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), our presentations included a very specific use case: “global pandemic”. No, we didn’t have a crystal ball through which we could foresee the COVID crisis, more than a decade in advance. But even back then, we were looking at the security benefits of VDI, if global health crisis did suddenly force workforces to go remote.

Desktop Virtualization solutions aren’t new to today’s organizations; countless IT teams have implemented some form of virtualization to provide better and more consistent experiences to employees. But during the rise of remote and hybrid working, virtualization has become even more ubiquitous. We recently sat down with Teodor Olteanu, Senior Delivery Manager, Workplace Technology Engineering at Flutter Entertainment, a leading global sports betting, gaming and entertainment organization.

Here’s a direct quote from an IT Manager I spoke with recently: “We’ve been using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for a large percentage of employees for a few years now, but between you and me, it’s been a mess.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a webinar together with Goliath Technologies about what we need to consider before moving your VDI workloads to Public Cloud. In this blog post I will try and write a summary of the various stages that should be part of the journey and also some of the pitfalls that you can encounter when moving your VDI workload to Public Cloud.

Why is it that when IT has to manage a virtual desktop environment, their job becomes infinitely harder? If you were to poll every major enterprise IT department, there’s always one team (or person) that’s ultimately held accountable for the organization’s Digital Employee Experience.

A common pain point we repeatedly hear from our customers that use Desktop as a Service (DaaS)/Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments is, “We have monitoring in place for physical hosts and infrastructure, but our employees still complain a lot.” If DaaS or VDI is part of your IT environment and you lack visibility into such environments to ensure effective employee experience, read on.