‍Which RDS Alternative is Best for Your Business?

If you’re still using Microsoft® Remote Desktop Services (RDS) to deliver Windows® applications or desktops to your employees or customers, and are considering other remote access technologies, this post is for you.

In your search for RDS alternatives, you’ve probably uncovered a myriad of choices. Which choice is best for you? That depends a lot on your use case for remote access. This post will review the most common use cases and the optimal technologies for each for organizations seeking an RDS alternative.

Use Cases

Use Case 1: Employee Desktops

‍For this use case, depending on your objective and priorities, the organization can go one of two ways: for organizations that want to maintain control over end user computing, running end user computing on-premises, i.e., owning and managing end user computing systems is the way to go. For organizations where maintaining control is not a priority, outsourcing the end user computing function as a service (generally called Desktop as a Service, or DaaS) is the obvious choice.

On Premises Operations

The most common technology for on-premises delivery of employee desktops is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). As recently as 2 years ago, employers had many technology choices for delivering desktops to employees from an on-premises data center. The leaders in this space were technology giants Citrix® and VMware®. Organizations could purchase on-premises licenses from both companies to run and manage EUC operations in their own data centers.

In addition to VDI solution VMware Horizon®, VMware also sold on-premises licenses for data center virtualization products like ESXi® and vSphere® that enabled employers to deliver virtual desktops/applications to their employees.

Organizations firmly committed to maintaining an on-premises end user computing operation do have choices other than Citrix and VMware:

• Nutanix® sells software for data centers and hybrid multi-cloud deployments. Its virtualization product, Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) can be used to run virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud and on-premises.
• Linux Containers (LXC) is an operating-system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated Linux systems on a control host using a single Linux kernel. It was introduced as an open source project under the Linux containers umbrella and has not been commercialized. LXC supports virtual machines running Windows 11.
• Oracle® VirtualBox is a hosted hypervisor for x86 virtualization for enterprise customers and is freely available as Open Source Software; for commercial use, organizations need to purchase an Enterprise license. VirtualBox can be used on-premises. Note that all environments (like testing and development servers) that interact with VirtualBox also need to be licensed; some experts recommend consulting a licensing expert prior to purchase to fully understand VirtualBox licensing before purchase.
• ProxMox Virtual Environment is a free open source virtualization platform that can create, deploy and manage virtual machines on-premises and in the cloud, including Windows 10 and 11 VMs. While ProxMox is open source, it does provide the reliability and flexibility necessary for enterprise-level deployments. ProxMox suggests that organizations using ProxMox commercially should purchase a support subscription.

Cloud-Based Services/DaaS

If control of your company’s EUC environment is not a priority, outsourcing EUC will free your team to focus on strategic projects.

DaaS providers:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the oldest public cloud service. AWS doesn’t provide a standard SLA across their entire cloud; instead, AWS provides SLAs for each service and has a variety of service choices for employee desktops.Amazon® AppStream 2.0, a fully managed service which can be configured for application streaming or for delivery of virtual desktops with selective persistence. AppStream lets IT convert desktop applications to SaaS without reconfiguring. Note that AWS pricing is highly complex—so complex that many consulting practices offer services to help project your costs.
• Microsoft Azure is the second-largest public cloud after AWS. Like AWS, each Azure service has its own SLA; uptime guarantees are similar to AWS. If you want to avoid RDS, Azure Virtual Desktop is a cloud-based service that virtualizes Windows operating systems and delivers virtualized Windows desktops and applications from Azure to end users. According to Microsoft, it is aimed at enterprise customers. You can use Microsoft’s pricing calculator to estimate your cost for running your workload on Azure.
• Google Cloud provides SLAs for specific services which vary based on the service tier. Google has three service tiers, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise; Google charges for the Premium and Enterprise tiers, which run directly on Google’s Premium backbone. Google Cloud has several approaches to configuring and delivering virtual desktops; additionally, Google’s partnerships with Citrix, itopia, Nutanix Frame, VMware Horizon, and Workspot™ gives customers many alternatives for delivering virtual desktops to employees.

Companies that operate in a limited geographical area can also consider a regionally-based DaaS provider, with the caveat that many regional providers are partners of one of the “big three” cloud providers described above and use that cloud as a platform for their DaaS offering. As partners, regional DaaS providers get partner pricing and may pass along some of those savings to their customers.

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Use Case 2: Hosted or Managed Service Providers

Hosted or Managed Service Providers (HSPs/MSPs), even those partnering with a major cloud provider, may want to differentiate their services by offering a remote access alternative to the more expensive DaaS services available from the cloud provider. For these HSPs/MSPs, GO-Global publishes Windows applications without RDS or Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), reducing cyber risk and delivering higher margins.

Compared to other application publishing solutions utilizing RDS and RDP, GO-Global is:

• Easy to Install—installs in as little as 15 minutes.
• Easy to configure—implementations are all configured from one console.
• Easy to manage—Manage applications, users, sessions, processes, licenses, load balancing, session definitions, authentication, passwords, encryption, branding, printing, and more from the same console used for your initial GO-Global implementation. Most actions can be completed in a few clicks.
• Easy to run on any cloud—while GO-Global delivers all the infrastructure components (like load balancing and security) needed to run on a private cloud, it doesn’t require you to use that functionality in a public cloud. Instead, GO-Global will leverage your cloud service’s existing infrastructure and security and scalability features to reduce your implementation’s complexity and cost.
• Easy license management—GO-Global’s Cloud Licensing service does most of the work needed to activate, change, add, and move licenses, and provides a 72-hour grace period should you experience a network outage.
• Uses a proprietary communications protocol—RapidX Protocol (RXP) is adaptive, uses multiple layers of compression, and is optimized to ensure the lowest possible bandwidth utilization. Because RXP is closed source, it offers additional defense against attackers. 

Use Case 3: Enterprise Organizations with Proprietary In-House Software

Many enterprise organizations utilize Windows applications that were built in-house to automate various parts of the business. Those that have outsourced employee desktops to a public cloud company may be struggling with how to deliver those in-house applications to the employees that need them to do their job.

All the major public cloud companies offer SDKs to optimize application performance on their cloud. But is that the best way to use a developer’s time? How easy—or difficult—is it to incorporate that application(s) in a corporate desktop delivered as DaaS to a fraction of employees?

GO-Global is an easy to implement, easy to manage solution for delivering a proprietary Windows application to a subset of employees. GO-Global runs in any cloud, leveraging existing infrastructure and security and scalability features to reduce the complexity and cost for delivering that application to only the employees that need it.

Use Case 4: Windows Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)

Windows ISVs using RDS to deliver Windows applications as a service to customers—from an on-premises or cloud-based data center, or from a public cloud—have several alternatives to RDS.

If the ISV is utilizing an on-premises data center, VDI is an alternative to RDS. But, as noted in Use Case 1, VDI market leaders Citrix and VMware no longer offer on-premises licenses, and most of the alternatives are open source, requiring technical expertise the ISV may not have. More importantly, VDI was designed to deliver desktops, with more complexity and overhead than an ISV needs. The same is true for an ISV delivering its application from a cloud-based data center.

ISVs using a public cloud that want to stop using RDS can consider using one of the public cloud provider’s DaaS offerings—but, again, DaaS is a solution for delivering desktops, not an application, with the higher costs associated with DaaS.

So what technology remains that does not utilize RDS and is not VDI or DaaS?

The last technology standing is GO-Global, an application publishing solution that doesn’t utilize RDS for application access.

GO-Global application publishing delivers Windows applications that, to the user, look and act like local applications but are actually running on a server. Windows ISVs can set up published application access on the user’s device so that the user accesses and launches a published application the same way that they would a local application.

GO-Global fully replaces RDS functionality, including multi-session kernel, Remote Desktop clients, display driver, protocol, internet gateway, and management tools, eliminating Windows and user licensing costs.

GO-Global delivers all the infrastructure components (like load balancing and security) needed to run on a private cloud, but doesn’t require those components to be used in a public cloud. Instead, GO-Global will leverage your cloud service’s existing infrastructure and security and scalability features to reduce your implementations' complexity and cost.

In addition to being a technical fit for ISVs looking to move away from RDS, GO-Global also creates cost savings as customers typically see a 40-70% reduction in costs.

For most organizations seeking an alternative to Microsoft RDS to enable remote access to Windows applications, GO-Global fully replaces RDS functionality to eliminate complexity and user licensing costs.

To learn more about GO-Global, download the free trial or schedule a demo.