It starts with good intentions. An IT team needs a way to connect users to digital workstations, so they build a quick solution—something simple, like hard-assigning users to specific machines. At first, it works. It’s fast, it’s custom, and it solves the immediate problem.
But simple doesn’t scale.
As teams grow and infrastructure becomes more complex—hybrid deployments, cloud bursting, GPU workloads—those homegrown tools begin to show their limits. What once felt flexible becomes rigid. What was cost-effective starts to waste resources. And what seemed manageable suddenly requires a full-time team to maintain.
From managing idle desktops to adapting to new display protocols, writing your own connection broker introduces more complexity than it removes. And eventually, the question becomes not just “how well is this working now?”, but “what happens when the person who built it moves on?”
It Starts Simple—Then Breaks Down
IT teams often try to fix access problems by writing their own connection tool. They start with something easy, like assigning users to specific machines. Even HP Anyware started that way. It’s fast to build but doesn’t scale.
Why Hard Assignments Waste Money
When users are tied to fixed machines, resources go unused. If every user gets their own high-performance server, you end up buying more than you need. Sharing a pool of machines saves money. You can reduce the number of workstations or cut cloud spend by powering machines up only when needed.
Managing Resource Pools Isn’t Easy
Once you add pooling, you face a new set of problems. How do you detect idle users? When do you shut down machines? What happens if someone leaves a session open? Writing logic for every edge case is harder than it looks. Most custom tools don’t catch them all.
Lock-In Slows You Down
Custom connection brokers are often tied to a specific tech stack. That limits your options. If your system is built for a certain cloud or display protocol, switching later takes more code. Say you want to replace NICE EnginFrame, start using Amazon DCV, or scale your HPC portal into a cloud HPC solution. A homegrown system makes that hard.
Technical Debt is a Real Risk
Writing your own connection broker means someone has to own the code. If that person leaves, your team may not know how to support it. That risk grows with time. Government IT teams, media production groups, oil and gas operations, and HPC admins can’t afford to be stuck with tools no one understands.
Use a Connection Broker That’s Built to Last
Leverage a ready-to-go connection broker that supports the tools you already use. Look for options that work with cloud GPU for video rendering, Linux HPC clusters, DoD HPC portals, Amazon DCV, and more. Whether you manage high performance compute for media, broadcast IT infrastructure, or geological data processing in energy, the right platform handles the edge cases so you don’t have to.
Stop writing code. Start managing users. Find a broker built for scale.