There has been no shortage of blog posts and articles recently with opinions on the best and most efficient remote working technologies. Especially when those articles/posts are written by technology vendors, you can be presented with a false choice that makes it more challenging to assess all of your options. MSPs need to provide solutions for their clients that will really benefit their business. Otherwise, it’s a waste of your time and your clients’ time.
One such problematic example of a false choice is choosing between VDI and VPN for remote workforces. The concept that your clients need to decide between VDI and VPNs is fundamentally flawed. If you’re struggling to sell these solutions, or find your clients are thinking to themselves, “I don’t like the sound of either of those options” – you’re not alone. And luckily, they do have another option.
Virtual Application Delivery > VDI or VPN
Virtual Application Deliver offers your customers access to all of the applications they need to be productive from home, regardless of the type of device they have to work on. Virtual Application Delivery platforms like Cameyo provide you with the ability to give all of your clients access to any Windows or web application on ANY device. Best of all, they can do all of this securely without VDI or VPN solutions’ complexity.
Let’s break it down a bit further so you can see the real benefits of Virtual Application Delivery over VDI and VPN.
Complexity
Many of our customers have come to us after trying VDI first and getting fed up. While a lot of what you read suggests that VDI can be deployed “in weeks”, a vast majority of the customers we’ve spoken with have told us nightmares about months of wasted time, only to never get it working correctly.
Cost
The cost of VDI can be very high for your customers which will be unappealing to most SMEs. The costliness comes from needing all the server hardware to run users’ desktops. And it’s important to remember that it’s not just the upfront cost of all that hardware – it’s the ongoing maintenance costs as well and the hours required from your MSP to keep things running smoothly.
Cameyo is a cloud-native Virtual Application Delivery platform that can run from any environment – cloud, hybrid, or on-premises. As a result, Cameyo generally saves companies 75% compared to VDI solutions.
Connectivity & Bandwidth
VDI requires good internet connections to work. Even a decrease in your customers’ home internet performance (increasingly common as many people have kids home streaming videos, games, etc. and taxing the home bandwidth) could make VDI unusable for people. Because Cameyo delivers applications via HTML5, we’re able to ensure that your customers can maintain access to even the most mission-critical applications, even on connections as slow as 2G.
User Experience
There are a couple of user experience issues caused by VDI, including the fact that many applications simply don’t work well via the remote connection of a VDI desktop. Cameyo supports both CPU-based productivity applications AND graphics-heavy GPU applications. The multi-tenant Virtual Application Delivery platform is so efficient that it is the only platform capable of supporting dozens of users per instance for CPU apps and up to 10 users per instance for GPU-based apps. Cameyo’selasticity means it automatically spins servers up and down based on user demand, ensuring the user experience is never interrupted by a spike in usage.
VPN vs Virtual Application Delivery
Security
With millions of people now working from home on personal devices that are not managed by IT, this is a significant concern that MSPs can solve. A VPN simply creates a secure connection between the user’s personal device and your customers’ corporate network – but what if a personal device is riddled with malware? That’s now directly connected to the network, with the ability to infect everything else connected to your clients’ network.
This is where Cameyo’s NoVPN capabilities come into play. NoVPN enables organisations to give remote workers secure access to Windows desktop and Intranet web apps from behind the corporate firewall without the cost and user-experience compromise of VPNs so that people can access business-critical applications from anywhere in the world just as productively as if they were in the office.
App Compatibility
Cameyo enables you to separate the device/OS from the application, so you can make any Windows or internal web application available on any device, from the browser. The same goes for organisations dealing with app compatibility issues for Windows 7 to Windows 10 migrations too.
Maintenance
Cameyo enables your customers to upload your applications to the platform and then publish them to all of your users. So when you need to update an application, you simply update the application once in Cameyo. All of your customers’ employees immediately have access to the latest version, without any action on their end (since the application is not installed locally on their devices).
Data Protection
With VPNs, any data or files the user works with will be copied locally onto the computer they’re working on from home. That has major data protection implications – especially for sensitive industries like Financial Services and Healthcare.
Cameyo seamlessly integrates with your file share service of choice (OneDrive, G Drive, Box, Dropbox, etc.), so you can determine which service they have access to and where their work can be stored. You can prevent users from saving files locally, and even prevent them from copy/pasting information from the browser in their Cameyo sessions.
Conclusion
Let’s be clear – Virtual Application Delivery is not going to be a perfect fit for every organisation, either. If you genuinely need to provide your customers with full virtual desktop capabilities, then Virtual Application Delivery does not provide that. But for many organisations, VDI is complete overkill. And for others, the cost and complexity simply remove it from being an option.
Your customers are probably like many organisations which simply need to provide their people with access to all of the critical applications they need to be productive. Virtual Application Delivery is the perfect solution for them. It is far more cost-effective, secure, and flexible – all while being far less complex and much faster/easier to deploy.
So don’t buy into the myth that you’re stuck with either delivering VDI or VPN. Achab has partnered with Cameyo to bring Virtual Application Delivery to UK MSPs.
