The Record - Issue 21: Summer 2021

67 I NT E R V I EW E xperiences throughout 2020 and 2021 have shown many organisations that remote and hybrid working models will be an impor- tant part of business success and resilience in the future. A service like Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) could be key to enabling these. “For organisations that require the ability to ‘burst scale’ digital workspaces, AVD is an ideal solution to enable their staff to work from any- where,” says Jason E. Smith, vice president of alliances and product marketing at Liquidware. “Using the cloud to deliver workspaces is a more flexible and agile approach than on-premises solu- tions. However, by combining Liquidware into the delivery stack, businesses can manage their workspaces no matter what platforms they use to provide Windows workspaces to their users.” Liquidware has been a Microsoft AVD partner since the service was announced in 2018 and has continued to work closely with Microsoft to develop the market for this desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution. “We see many enterprise organisations deploying a hybrid approach of physical, vir- tual and cloud-based workspaces to provide the most business beneficial solution,” says Smith. “Building Liquidware into their environments enables them to design, manage and monitor their workspaces across platforms.” For businesses using Liquidware on top of AVD, Smith says that they benefit from three key aspects: visibility, as it provides a compre- hensive picture of the entire environment across platforms and infrastructure; portability, users and applications can move across Windows workspaces regardless of operating system and platform; and scalability, as users can leverage all workspace delivery models across physical, virtual and the cloud. And these characteristics have proved invaluable for Liquidware customers over the last year or so. “Without a doubt the pandemic provided a significant boost in remote working solutions and we’ve seen many of our customers moving to AVD and other DaaS solutions to support a work-from-anywhere requirement,” says Smith. “In 2020 we sponsored some market research with the Enterprise Strategy Group. It found that while 23 per cent of the surveyed organisations do not use DaaS today, they are in the process of their first deployment or proof of concept. We see this trend continuing over the coming months and years as digital workspaces become more fluid and portable. Moving them to the cloud makes a lot of sense, both commercially and economically. “While on-premises solutions will remain for office-based workers, we see the adoption of DaaS increasing due to the flexibility of scaling workspaces using the cloud.” With remote and hybrid working becoming a key part of business operations, Liquidware’s Jason E. Smith shares the value of Azure Virtual Desktop and how Liquidware ensures users are connected, operational and productive Working from anywhere with the cloud “Azure Virtual Desktop is an ideal solution to enable staff to work from anywhere” BY E L LY YAT E S - ROB E R T S