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2020 Blog, Blog, Cloud Blog, Featured

Secured Cloud Desktop using Amazon WorkSpaces

Amazon WorkSpaces is a simple to use, cloud based, managed secure Desktop solution. It is a one click deployment product which is available on Windows and Linux operating systems. The main advantage of using Amazon WorkSpaces is as follows.

  • Easy to provision, Desktop as a Service (DaaS)
  • Provision, de-provision and lifecycle management using your existing ITSM (ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk or Freshservice)
  • Extend your existing On-Premise Desktops/Laptops with the AWS Workspaces and manage it centrally
  • Secured data with reliable, High Availability enabled Desktop solution
  • Cost effective and on-demand flexibility
  • Manage and scale up or scale down based on the business need in a centralized way
  • Accelerate deployment at scale

Need for a secured and effective Cloud End User Computing Model

Amazon WorkSpaces helps in adopting a secure, managed cloud-based virtual desktop model to fulfil your End User Computing (EUC) IT requirement needs. Also, it ensures Organizations move away from the pain of procurement, deployment, and management of a complex environment. The traditional method also has a challenge where the hardware and licenses can be scaled up with additional cost, in case of a need but cannot be scaled down and ends up with unwanted cost in case of seasonal spike. Amazon WorkSpaces help organizations scale up and scale down based on demand and deploy at scale with few click deployment models and with enhanced security of your cloud Desktop. Relevance Lab’s pre-baked solution helps your IT team who has minimal knowledge on AWS adopt DaaS solutions with usage of ITSM platforms or custom Cloud Portal.

Best Practices of Network design for Amazon WorkSpaces


VPC It is recommended to use a separate VPC for your WorkSpaces implementation. This helps us define the required governance and security guardrails by creating traffic separation.
Directory Service Each AWS Directory service build requires a pair of subnets for high availability across Amazon availability zones.
Subnet size Subnet sizes are permanent and cannot be modified and hence need to plan for future capacity. You can define a default security group to your directory services which implies it to all the WorkSpaces under this directory services. Additionally, you can have multiple directory services use the same subnet.
Network Connectivity Whether you are looking for a pure cloud solution for your AWS WorkSpaces or planning to integrate with your existing on-prem setup, AWS helps achieve both using multiple options as below.
Option 1 – Extend your existing directory to the AWS Cloud.
Option 2 – Utilize your existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory by using AWS directory Service, AD Connector.
Option 3 – Integrate your on-premise server with AD Connector to provide multi-factor authentication (MFA) to your WorkSpaces.
Option 4 -Create a managed directory with AWS Directory Service, Microsoft AD or Simple AD, to manage your users and WorkSpaces.

Observability of AWS WorkSpaces

This deals with managing lifecycle from creation, usage and termination in an optimal manner. This covers following three areas.

  1. Security and Governance
  2. As per AWS best practices, every individual user account should be set up with AWS IAM roles with right permissions and enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) with each account. Different WorkSpaces on the same physical host are isolated from each other through the hypervisor as though they are on separate physical hosts.

  3. Health Monitoring
  4. CloudWatch Metrics for WorkSpaces gives an insight to the overall health and connection status of all WorkSpaces. This can be per Desktop or aggregated for all WorkSpaces within a Directory. Apart from the default metrics, you can also enable additional metrics.

  5. Cost Optimization
  6. AWS WorkSpaces billing is based on usage and there are 2 options to choose by default.

    • AlwaysOn – This is the best option when you are a monthly billing mode, and your usage is typically around 6 to 9 hours a day.
    • AutoStop – This is the ideal option when you are on hourly billing. You can have the WorkSpaces stop after a specified time of inactivity which stops the billing.

One of the best practices is to monitor the usage of the WorkSpaces running mode using Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer. This solution uses an Amazon CloudWatch event that invokes an AWS Lambda function every 24 hours. This can then convert your WorkSpaces to the most cost-effective model from the next billing cycle. (Hourly to Monthly or Monthly to Hourly) based on your usage pattern.



Automation

WorkSpaces provisioning can be automated using your existing ITSM platforms like ServiceNow, Jira, ServiceDesk or Freshservice. There are existing connectors like AWS Service Management Connector and RLCatalyst Service Management Connector providing end to end automation.


AWS Products Used


Relevance Lab is a specalist AWS partner for Desktop as a Service using AWS Workspaces. It has implemented Workspaces with its pre-integrated, secured and matured solutions for its clients using their existing ITSM tools. This has helped customers for a faster adoption of cloud and promoted the cost optimization journey. Relevance Lab’s DaaS solution offering starts with an assessment questionnaire that can help your organizations understand the need to migrate to a secured, scalable and matured solution. Based on the assessment scorecard, we recommend the right solution based on automation, security, governance and compliance model.

This blog refers to the standard Desktop as a Service using AWS Workspaces. In more advanced scenario’s adoption of DaaS also involves additional steps like Storage, Log Monitoring, Security Analytics (SIEM, SOAR), Mail and Office suite options, Container Deployment and Application security signing which will be covered in a separate blog.


For more details or for the assessment questionnaire please reach out to marketing@relevancelab.com



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