The News: Leostream, a long-time vendor of desktop brokering, recommends ways to centralize control and management of complex environments using its broker. Read the full Tech Alert: Using Connection Brokers in Parallel IT Systems.
Leostream Delivers Multi-Vendor Virtual Desktops from a Hybrid Cloud
Analyst Take: Although 2024 continues not to be the year of VDI, many staff still need to access remote applications written for a local desktop. Not all applications are accessible through a web browser, despite decades of predicting the end of desktop applications. Virtual desktops or remote desktops have always allowed the separation of the application from its user interface. Historically, these applications ran in data centers, and the user interface was delivered to a thin client or PC wherever the user was on the day. In large organizations, these desktop applications run on-premises and in multiple public clouds and co-location data centers. The diversity of technologies under these multi-cloud environments makes it hard to find a single VDI vendor that supports all the platforms without excessive cost. The need for multi-vendor virtual desktops is exactly where Leostream helps large organizations.
Leostream produced one of the first desktop connection brokers when VDI was a new technology. When other connection broker companies were bought by virtualization or operating system vendors, Leostream remained independent. Rather than building a custom desktop deployment technology and remote display protocol, Leostream developed integration to work with and optimize native deployment technologies and display protocols. The central idea is to provide multi-vendor virtual desktops with a single point of user access and IT control. Leostream supports desktops running on popular hypervisors and clouds, with support for OpenStack and KubeVirt showing the breadth of Leostream’s multi-vendor support.
I am glad Leostream has added a secure gateway service to the broker, allowing desktop access from an untrusted network without needing a VPN. The secure gateway was a direct result of work-from-home orders during the pandemic and is extremely useful for delivering protected desktops over an untrusted network like the Internet to untrusted devices like home PCs. From my previous perspective of teaching VMware’s VDI courses, I tended to view Leostream as delivering a single feature rather than a full product because connection brokering is only one part of the VMware Horizon suite. But when I look from the perspective of an enterprise organization struggling to deliver desktop applications across a multi-cloud estate, I can see far more value in multi-vendor virtual desktops that use the native features of each platform without having to use the individual management consoles of every cloud and on-premises platform.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Alastair has made a twenty-year career out of helping people understand complex IT infrastructure and how to build solutions that fulfil business needs. Much of his career has included teaching official training courses for vendors, including HPE, VMware, and AWS. Alastair has written hundreds of analyst articles and papers exploring products and topics around on-premises infrastructure and virtualization and getting the most out of public cloud and hybrid infrastructure. Alastair has also been involved in community-driven, practitioner-led education through the vBrownBag podcast and the vBrownBag TechTalks.
