So, the year of VDI never quite arrived. Without placing any blame, we can certainly assert that the slow traction for VDI had primarily to do with the hefty licensing fees associated with the VDI stack. Moreover, with the advent of the public cloud, on-premises private infrastructure is becoming less attractive by the day.
So, where does that leave us now? Well, let’s start by putting aside VDI and examining the entire enterprise IT environment. Most likely, this includes virtual workstations, physical workstations, and hosted applications. However, it’s unlikely that they all reside in just one place. The vast majority of enterprise organizations have expanded their IT environments beyond the on-premises datacenter into local private clouds, public clouds, edge datacenters.
What about IT admins tasked with managing user access to all this heterogeneous infrastructure? Now we arrive at the role of a connection broker. Let’s take a closer look –
A connection broker is a software layer that sits on top (but not in the data path) of your entire IT environment to provide remote access to all of your resources. The connection broker acts as an intermediary between the user and the resource. Users can access their desktops and applications on-demand from any location with an internet connection.
In terms of management, the connection broker handles all desktop provisioning, user role assignments, and scheduled power on and power off times. By implementing a vendor-neutral connection broker, management of all your IT resources occurs within a single-pane-of-glass interface. As you might imagine, this drastically simplifies the task and makes it possible, for organizations who have not done so already, to comfortably branch out into outside infrastructure or a hybrid cloud solution.
Effective brokering is paramount to the success of a mixed or hybrid IT environment. To take a deeper dive into current connection broker technology, check out our predictions for 2025.