NEC to move its IT into Azure and give staff – all 110,000 of ’em – a cloudy Windows desktop Japanese tech services giant NEC has struck a “new multi-year strategic partnership” with Microsoft. The immediate impact of the deal will be NEC migrating all its on-prem infrastructure into Azure, and “deploy Azure Virtual Desktop and other Azure services among the NEC Group’s 110,000 employees worldwide”. Neither NEC nor …
Bad news NEC...Teams is shit. Good luck with reliable video calls on it. Better of with Zoom, which actually works.
Teams is so bad, if someone copies in log or code and you try to select some of it and copy it, it pastes the whole block.
I suppose it great for making your onshore office workers as inefficient as offshore workers with lots of lag to DC's out of region.
Go from using a new M1 Mac locally to a Citrix Remote Desktop in Azure. Urrrrgh. It's like wading through treacle....and no its not sweet.
"Better of with Zoom, which actually works."
Dell tech support remotely does maintenance with the company EMC boxes through my work computer. Although I'm giving the techie access to a single screen in my multidisplay setup, (s)he can move the mouse to other screens as well, which is quite scary actually.
Remoting through Zoom or Teams, can't see any difference otherwise. I'm doing video and audio calls every few days and it just works.
Annoying: Zoom Windows client cannot decipher the session password when I'm pasting the URL with the pw included.
"Go from using a new M1 Mac locally to a Citrix Remote Desktop in Azure. Urrrrgh. It's like wading through treacle....and no its not sweet."
A silly comparison. Do you work in IT?
Those Citrix servers very likely don't have as much single-core oomph as M1 Mac has, and each server probably cater to (way) more than one user. Your company may not have the resources or need to rent highest speed servers from Azure. Or someone has calculated badly the resources needed.
Company I work for has onprem Citrix with a few hundred applications published through it. Very few applications would have MacOS equivalent to begin with, and maintenance of those applications is much easier and more secure in this setup. YMMV.
The your local camera definitely can be redirected into the remote session, which Teams will then dutifily use as if it were local. Just look for the webcam redirection option I'm your RDP/Citrix/whatever client.
The VDI deployments my company uses would not have worked these past 18 months without webcams!
NEC made the same promise in November 2020 – but for AWS engineers. ... NEC and Google also struck a deal in 2018 to “better serve Japanese enterprises”.
I'm reminded of an old saying: "once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is getting to be a habit". Or do they believe in "third time lucky"?
I don't know about Azure virtual desktops, but Citrix has solved the issue of Teams audio/video for remote users. The Citrix Workspace client that goes on your local PC is used to offload the audio/video streams--basically, the Citrix server tells the Workspace client to initiate those streams, so they are only going directly from your PC to the MS infrastructure, and not through the Citrix server (as video over that would be terrible, of course). And of course they also properly see your local camera and audio devices through Citrix as well.
My company has been fully remote for about 16 months, so have relied even more heavily on Citrix than we used to (we have a pretty distributed workforce in any case, so it was always used quite a bit).
It's harder to get WebEx and Zoom optimized in the same way, since those optimizations aren't built into Citrix, but they both offer a specialized VDI client app you can use to make it happen.
Though I will say if you're considering using Citrix, try to get someone who really knows what they're doing to configure it. It can require a LOT of tuning to work well, especially with properly managing the user profiles that stream out to whatever server the user's session comes up on and then get stored back to a storage location when they log off. We've had a LOT of issues with profiles over the years that took a long time to get stabilized. You can try using profile disks (where the profile is stored in a virtual disk file that just gets mounted, avoiding the need to stream the files back and forth), something like FSLogix, etc, but everything requires a lot of tuning and keeping on top of changes that occur due to new OS/app versions and path/file changes in profiles as far as what should or should not be stored.
Citrix also pissed us off recently because although our production environment is entirely on-prem, we also have another one for our DR running in a cloud provider (as IaaS, so entirely our own collection of servers that just happen to be running there), but the latest version of Citrix will NOT allow you to use your own delivery controllers in a cloud environment, they want to force you to use their cloud delivery controller service for it.
Still, overall, we get a much better experience with Citrix than we would with RDS..
Even less that that, a few MS365/Azure login issues and everything is utterly stuffed however all the SLAs will still be met because the login portal still comes up.
Imagine a scenario where 3 or 4 large corporates effectively controlled the IT infrastructure from 90% of companies, all accessing it over a piece of wire..........
Just as utilities are being targeted by cyber criminals these providers will be as well and it only take one tiny chink for the impact to be global. Nothing is 100% secure, ever, it is just about time and resources.
At some point it will go down and the ensuing catastrophe will blame everyone except those who made the decisions to put everything into "The Cloud". There is still this hype that "The Cloud" is some sort of IT nirvana that never goes wrong, never requires any maintenance, is always available, is cheaper and is better than anything that can be done in your own data centres.
It has it's place, probably just not the way everything is being shovelled into it as IT is at the moment.
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