When business continuity is key

This will be the year for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) without any doubt. As covid-19 hit the core structure for most companies, moving to the cloud was a necessity to achieve business continuity. However, this transition needs a lot of planning, testing, knowledge, and efforts to attain a successful migration to the cloud. This is where some companies decided to utilize virtual desktops to maintain a secure, reliable, scalable, and easy to manage machines for employees working remotely and this is where our fruitful journey started with Monty Mobile.

Virtual Desktops was the perfect match for Monty Mobile to meet customer needs and sustain a long-term successful relationship without disturbing their day-to-day operations. One of the major tasks that Monty Mobile NOC Engineers had is remote application testing for services they maintain and monitor to guarantee a 99% uptime per year in addition to managing their local VDI infrastructure which required a lot of efforts when it comes to maintenance, security, hardware failures, and software problems. The infrastructure design of that application testing sandbox required application testing to be conducted from several machines with different public IP addresses which were difficult to achieve remotely without the emergence of Desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) technology.

The impact of evading this case would have affected millions of real-time traffic between tenants and end users resulting in global services interruption in addition to financial loss, maintenance overhead, and most importantly years of building solid trust with clients.

Heading in the right direction

Picking the right cloud provider to host the desktops virtually was one of the most significant decisions Monty Mobile Engineers had to take in order to keep up a stable relationship with clients and shift their desktops to the cloud in almost no time. Solutions Architects at Monty Mobile recognized the incomparable knowledge, skills, and experience of AWS being the first to launch a rapidly growing cloud desktop-as-a-service solution in March 2014. Amazon Workspaces are secured managed cloud desktops that make it easy for individuals to run and access using multiple devices such as mobile, Mac, Chromebooks, browsers, or thin clients at anytime and anywhere with the ability to also handle patching and management of the desktops in a very cost-effective pay-as-you-go model which can either be hourly or monthly.

Choosing the right partner

Monty Mobile decided to act immediately and approached Zero and One, a Premier AWS Partner focusing on Cloud Migration, Security & Compliance, End User Computing, and DevOps solutions. Zero and One team assigned a team of certified experts to assess and understand the current setup of Monty’s infrastructure to offer the finest solution for the given case. It was clear that setting the right solution was critical for Monty Mobile business and this is where Zero and One team decided to act instantly by designing a secure, highly available, and cost-efficient infrastructure.

Invent and Simplify

Zero and One Engineers examined the on-prem setup and proposed a swift solution that will ensure that Monty’s NOC Engineers will not be affected, and the application testing will resume working remotely. As shown in the below figure, the VPC was designed with two private and two public subnets that span two availability zones for high availability and fault tolerance. An AWS Site-to-Site VPN tunnel was configured in the first place to guarantee encrypted traffic between the on-prem data center via IPSec. NOC Engineers can then access these workspaces using their credentials by proxying directory requests to Monty Mobile on-premises active directory via an AWS AD Connector which by default requires at least 2 subnets spanned in multiple Availability Zones. This setup also assures that all services are hosted in private networks with only outbound internet connections through NAT Gateways to avoid any possible security threats or unauthorized access to the workspaces.

After a successful transition to the cloud with minimal efforts, Monty Mobile realized the power of Amazon Workspaces and decided to spin up multiple other development workspaces where developers can share jointly custom images that contain the same OS, software, dependencies, and settings for the workspaces in the event of any disaster or unexpected failures. IT Admins have also noticed significant progress by leveraging some monitoring and management automation tasks such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Systems Manager in addition to Workspaces Application Manager (AWS WAM) which helped admins to reduce software installation and licensing overhead for user machines by adding applications such as (Notepad++, Microsoft Visual Studio, Python, and more) from AWS Marketplace and then assigning it to users in their active directory.

Building trust with confidence

Overall, Amazon Workspaces had a positive outcome on different departments. After setting up all the required AWS services, Monty Mobile technical staff observed a remarkable improvement whilst interacting with Amazon Workspaces in terms of performance, flexibility, and security. Amazon Workspaces also helped the HR department to remain their recruitment plan unaffected by providing new employees an on-demand secured Amazon Workspaces as their desktops. Furthermore, Zero and One assisted Monty Mobile to cut infrastructure cost by reducing the additional expenses required to manage the machines and applications using a cost-efficient solution that automatically identify and convert the billing preference to monthly or hourly based on the Workspace usage without any up-front commitment.