Virtual desktops
One desktop per person, running in Orlando, reachable from anywhere
Colo Solutions hosts virtual desktops from its Orlando data center. Each user gets a full
Windows desktop — multiple monitors, line-of-business software, their own profile — streamed
to whatever device they are holding. The computing happens in the facility, so the endpoint
stops being the thing that has to be fast, secure and backed up.
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What this actually solves
One of our larger virtual desktop customers is a home health care agency with six offices
across three states. Before, connecting those offices to shared files meant slow VPNs or
expensive leased lines, and every branch was its own little IT problem. Now the desktops and
the data sit together in Orlando and the desktop is streamed to each office — so multi-user,
real-time editing of the same files works the way it would if everyone were in one building.
That is the honest test for this product: if your problem is that your offices cannot get at
the same data quickly, it fits. If you have one office and fast local storage, it may not.
Control and data protection
The reason to centralize desktops is usually control, so these are the controls — set per
deployment, by you.
Beyond daily backups, hardware snapshots allow immediate restoration after a large loss
event such as ransomware, and file-level restore recovers individually deleted files.
Off-site replication to a mid-Atlantic facility is available for redundancy against a
regional event.
Cost shape
Virtual desktops are billed per user on a subscription, and adding or removing users is a
change to that subscription rather than a hardware purchase. Under our Pay As You Grow
expansion program the server stays a fixed cost and size until you order an expansion or add
users, so the bill does not move on its own. There are no endpoint hardware refresh cycles
to fund, and existing user hardware tends to last longer because it is only streaming a
desktop.
The remaining points of failure are worth naming rather than hiding: your internet provider,
your local firewall, and your office wireless. All three are mitigable, and none of them is
in our facility.