Healthcare and Life Sciences Blog

7 MIN READ

How to Break Free from Traditional VDI with W365

Microsoft

Mar 21, 2024

As healthcare organizations invested heavily in traditional VDI on-premises solutions are found at a crossroads; continue with complex, costly infrastructure, management overhead or pivot to a future where agility, simplicity, and innovation lead. Windows 365 presents as the steppingstone to revolutionize healthcare experience for windows ecosystems.

This is a virtual webinar event series for healthcare focused on Microsoft Windows 365 Cloud PC Cloud Virtualization Desktop solution (a SaaS product), be sure to follow the full agenda for other sessions:

aka.ms/w365HealthcareVirtualWebinar

#W365HealthcareVirtualWebinar

Our Speakers

We have the pleasure of delivering a selective experience with a broad range of speakers focused on healthcare from (technical, specialist and engineering), make sure to follow them.

Juan Sifuentes

Jesse Asmond

Sam Tulimat

A Mail Server Story

Before we dive in, let’s rewind and look back at a similar story.

There was a time when we had to build mail servers on-premises and scale to support user-demand. Much of the complexity of relying on hardware, data centers, network connections, was a way to scale up mail flow routing architecture designs to support increasing demand as organizations were growing rapidly.

An idea of “a mail server in the cloud” was just not there.

A few years went by, someone thought of a solution offering to solve this problem, they called it “BPOS” (Business Productivity Online Services). We all know that story, this was fairly new, and organizations started wondering about data resilience, compliance, HIPPA and many other requirements used in healthcare traditional mail on-premises. A year after, a so called “Wave 15” was officially released running Exchange Online in the cloud.

This was the beginning of a new mail flow modern era.

Fast forward, today most organizations have realized the power of Office 365 and the simplicity of Exchange Online, empowering users to send/receive mail by just assigning a license, removing much of the complexity we had back then.

The question whether you should run mail on-premises or in the cloud, is Why? Our life is tailored to simplicity, from the car we drive, to the stuff we buy, or the solutions we rely on, the ease of agility that Exchange Online brings is one example.

Traditional VDI (what does it take?)

Now let’s understand how extensive can become working with traditional VDI. Although we’re focusing on healthcare, the framework should be very similar to other industries.

Working with traditional on-premises VDI, is formed by building a house, and that house aligns to a set of layers, tailored to support multiple experiences:

Multiple audiences (clinicians and non-clinicians)
Set of pools for windows experiences
Built for specific cases or scenarios.
Divided into persistent or non-persistent experience.
Different locations (users working on-site, remotely, or mobile)

Behind these audiences, there’s a set of backbone servers that must be scalable and reliable to support this experience, but not limited to:

Domain Controllers
Application servers
Management servers
Roaming profiles (folder redirection and user profiles)
Desktop Virtualization Infrastructure Control Plane
Master Images Templates

Behind the backbone, there’s a set of layers to secure, provision and maintain this windows ecosystem:

Virtual Network Protection software appliance
Virtual Management software appliance
Virtual Monitoring software appliance
Virtual Configuration software appliance
Virtual Provisioning software appliance

Often, it is usual to find agentless or lightweight AV products, rather than full-client thick scanning services, to prevent impact to user experience:

Virtual Endpoint agentless software appliance

Like any house, there’s a foundation hardware that could limit your options in traditional VDI (e.g. memory optimization, resources reallocation, virtual machine migration, etc.):

Hardware Hypervisor server appliance (CPU family alignment)
Hardware Storage server appliance

For many years, traditional VDI have been crucial to streamline windows ecosystems in the healthcare industry, and it has become the way to support the clinician and non-clinician experience. In this model, traditional VDI forces high accountability on healthcare organizations to deliver the windows experience.

Business Challenges in Traditional VDI

At the end all this adds up to support one-location, but now we live in a modern hybrid work era, where user-demand is increasing rapidly (e.g. M&A, BYOPC remote access, new branch locations, telehealth, call centers, etc.) and IT systems need to account for new responsibilities, aligned to new resources to scale, design, support, and maintain the windows ecosystem.

Crossing across some of the major blockers in traditional VDI:

High infrastructure costs (upfront investment)
Specialized VDI skills
Resources allocations and overutilization
Management overhead & maintenance
Limited flexibility (rigid and hard to adopt new user-demand)
Performance degradation
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery decisions
Security and compliance risks (expansion introduces new challenges)
Complexity increase
Cost budgeting projections (lack of predictable pricing)

Breaking Free (Desktop of the Future)

The desktop of the future aims to revolutionize the healthcare industry, while business stakeholders shift accountability and responsibility to Microsoft to deliver the windows experience to clinicians and non-clinicians.

The Windows 365 Admin Center Control Plane becomes the foundation layer for design, scale, support and maintain the windows experience, only to allow IT professionals to focus on the user personas and business scenarios that will need to consume that experience, by building Cloud PC Provisioning policies (Enterprise and Frontline) to bring a low-latency experience closer to the user location.

Removing much of the complexity of traditional VDI.

The rest of the layers of the house will still be applicable and happen automatically, as there’s a lot of automation that happens in the backend, to some extent some will need an initial configuration, but with much less dependency, creating a new focus on the big picture:

Gallery Images Cloud PC are aligned with the same experience.
- Microsoft 365 Apps
- Microsoft Teams (optimized for VDI audio/video redirection)
- OneDrive redirection (user data profile)
- Windows 10/11 enterprise experience
- Auto-joined (Microsoft Entra or Hybrid ID Joined)
- Auto-enrolled MDM (Microsoft Intune or Co-Management SCCM)
- Windows Updates optimized (latest supported version)
- Persistent dedicated compute/performance/storage (Enterprise or Frontline)
- Custom Images option available
Reporting monitoring dashboard enhanced for Cloud PCs
- Microsoft Endpoint Analysis
Application delivery repository for Cloud PCs (e.g. LOB, Win32, Store Apps, etc.)
- Microsoft Intune
- Microsoft Intune Suite (Enterprise Application Management)
- Co-Management SCCM
Network scalable to different Cloud PC scenarios.
- Isolated (Microsoft Hosted Network)
- Hub-to-spoke topology (Bring your Azure Network)
- Extend your environment (Bring your On-premises Network)
- Cloud PC Architecture design options
MDM management workload for Cloud PCs scenarios.
- Microsoft Intune
- Co-Management SCCM
- Cloud PC Computer Management design options
Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution powered by Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Azure Virtual Desktop (service backbone)
Availability to quickly scale to multiple regions.
- Datacenter regions across the Globe
Predictable pricing, flat rate-cost
- Offered as a Software as a Service (SaaS)

Scaling User-demand with Modern Solutions

As healthcare organizations look to sustain and support continuous increasing user-demand, the agility and simplicity of Windows 365 will empower to deliver a secured windows ecosystem much faster and meet up-changing dynamic end-user experience.

Business stakeholders seek to take advantage of this new model to balance Capex and Opex decisions in a calibrated investment to promote operational efficiency.

By building a foundation of benefits for healthcare organizations:

Predictable pricing (reduced upfront infra cost, calibrated investment)
Proactive/Reactive response (M&A, BYO, remote access, contractors overseas, etc..)
Elasticity (flexible licensing models for any audience)
Enhanced & consistence end-user experience
Scalable (agile to deliver a low latency exp. during health peak seasons)
Simplified management (reduced infrastructure & management overhead)
BYO empowerment (anywhere, anytime, any device)
Interoperability (maximize collaboration among healthcare teams)
Improve user onboarding and lifecycle management process
Vendor integrations (VMware, Citrix, Imprivata & IGEL)

The Journey of Digital Transformation

Most healthcare organizations are found in the first stage of the journey with Traditional VDI running on-premises. Business stakeholders should look at these as “opportunities” and embrace for disruptive technology innovation as the cornerstone of their strategic plan for a new investment.

Focus on removing complexity and responsibility by shifting that to Microsoft, with the power of Windows 365, with areas of improvement that will ease that transition.

Scalable ready: Windows 365 solution offers simplicity and agility to quickly scale to diverse user-demand opportunities.
Empower the workforce: Windows 365 allows healthcare workers to access Cloud PCs from any device and any location, improving their productivity, mobility, and collaboration, providing a familiar and personalized Windows experience, increasing user satisfaction and retention.
Enhance the security posture: Windows 365 helps healthcare organizations protect their patient data and comply with privacy and security standards, such as HIPAA and GDPR.

Licensing models

Windows 365 supports a range of compute and storage configurations, as well as optional GPU capabilities, to meet different user needs and workloads.

Windows 365 Cloud PC offers two editions: Enterprise and Frontline.

Windows 365 Enterprise licensing model:

1 Cloud PC for 1 employee (1:1)
Dedicated performance & experience
24/7 access available (e.g. BYOPC users, contractors, remote users)
License assigned per user.
Predictable pricing (per user/month)

Windows 365 Frontline licensing model:

1 Cloud PC for 3 employees (1:3)
Dedicated performance & experience
Access only when needed (e.g. shift workers, part-time workers)
Concurrent sessions consumed (set of pool of licenses available to connect)
Flat rate cost per month

Value Proposition

Reduce the TCO:

Windows 365 simplifies and streamlines the IT environment, reducing the complexity, cost, and risk of traditional VDI solutions.
Windows 365 eliminates the need for upfront and ongoing investments in hardware, software, and maintenance, as well as specialized skills and resources.
Windows 365 also provides predictable and transparent pricing, with no hidden fees or charges.
Windows 365 allocates resources more efficiently by reducing time and labor with management overhead.

Windows 365 Economic Investment

Windows 365 Gartner Report

Solution Integrations

There are many integrations available to integrate in a Windows 365 environment:

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (secure the Cloud PC)
Microsoft Purview Customer key (data protection Cloud PC)
Microsoft Entra Conditional Access (control access and authentication to Cloud PC)
Microsoft Viva (accelerate HR employee onboarding experience)
Microsoft Intune Suite (deliver a full UEM experience in Cloud PC)
Microsoft Remote Help (remote assistance a Cloud PC)
Microsoft Copilot (enhance AI assistance running in windows Cloud PC)
Extended Security Updates (FREE ESU support for Cloud PCs running Windows 10 devices)