Gone are the days of the entirely on-prem VDI stack. The vast majority of organizations have moved to the cloud in some capacity or another – largely AWS. Implementing an effective multi-cloud strategy can be the key to long-term hosted desktop or application success. By leveraging the best of on-prem, in conjunction with multiple public cloud platforms, you can have best-in-class performance while maximizing cost savings. In other words, have your cake and eat it too!

 

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The three major public cloud offerings are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Most recently, we discussed the rise of Azure as a VDI, DaaS, or hosted application platform. With the vGPUs to beat out AWS on the graphics-intense applications, Azure brings a competitive offering to the Cloud-hosting space.

 

But AWS and Azure aren’t the only ones on the Cloud scene.  New kid on the block, Google Cloud Platform is poised to rise to the occasion with competitive, granular, pricing. Not to mention, it’s built on Google infrastructure. Their website boasts the likes of Spotify, Snapchat, and Coca-Cola all adopting the new platform.

Ask The Important Questions

When architecting your multi-cloud environment, examine each public cloud offering (don’t worry, we’ve made you a cheat sheet), as well as the management needs of your current on-prem or private cloud infrastructure.  Ask yourself –

  • Do you have power users who run graphics-intense applications?
  • Do you have legacy apps you’d like anywhere access to?
  • Are there virtual desktops or storage you’d like to move to the cloud?
  • Do you need a mix of Linux, Windows or a generally heterogenous environment?

With these questions in mind, pick, choose, and customize your hosted environment to your organizations’ specifications.

Select Your Management Layer

When selecting a management layer to orchestrate all the components of your multi-cloud environment there are a few “must-have” feature to take your multi-cloud environment from a hodgepodge of infrastructure and cloud platforms to an effective multi-cloud solution. 

  • Resource Tracking – Keeping tabs on your resources is essential when they are spread across multiple platforms. The ideal management layer is one where you can view all your resources for a single interface.
  • Provisioning and Usage – Accessing each cloud platform individually to provision new machines just isn’t feasible. Find a management layer that is able to spin up and delete instances directly in your cloud account or your on-prem datacenter. More importantly, provisioning features such as power plans and usage tracking help keep you from racking up those pesky compute costs in the public cloud.
  • Multi-Cloud Support and Heterogenous Environments– This one seems pretty obvious, but we’ll throw it in there anyway. Make sure your cloud management platform supports all major public cloud offerings as well are a variety of back ends. Additionally, consider if your user base has a need for Linux as well as Windows or MacOS machines.
  • Protocol Support – One of the most frequently over looked components of a VDI, DaaS, or hosted desktop solution is the protocol. The protocol is the software through which the user connects to the desktop. You want a management layer that supports multiple protocols, but also does not sit in the way of protocol traffic, thus hindering performance. Protocols can range from free and open source to pixel-perfect high performance. Make sure you select the right one for your use case!

 

Leostream Can Help

The Leostream Connection Broker is the perfect tool to tie all the pieces together. By deploying the Leostream Connection Broker on top of your environment, you can manage all your public cloud instances alongside your private cloud resources. For secure user access, add in the Leostream Gateway, which provides a encrypted portal to protect your resources both in the cloud and on-prem.

Want some help or advice pulling it all together? Leostream can help with that too! Contact us at [email protected] to speak to a VDI expert.