Amazon WorkSpaces Reviews

We migrate the current VDI on-premise solution to Amazon WorkSpaces in the cloud on AWS. Organizations using Citrix, Horizon View, VMware Horizon View, or Citrix ZenApp, ZenDesktop who want to move to a cloud solution or cloud VDI solution often look for effective solutions such as Amazon WorkSpaces.

Amazon WorkSpaces Pools is a new solution that allows a group of users to use shared workspaces. The solution is secured with strong encryption features in Amazon WorkSpaces.

Integration is very easy with the AWS ecosystem for Amazon WorkSpaces.

The persistent desktop experience feature is useful for VIP users who don't want to share their desktops.

Multi-factor authentication is enabled on AWS WorkSpaces, which provides additional security when connecting.

There could be an end-to-end tool similar to AWS Transform that helps from assessment to migration. A single orchestrator tool could assist with discovery, implementation, and image building for Amazon WorkSpaces.

O365 and other Microsoft products can become problematic at times, and there are some network health-related issues that appear occasionally regarding functionality inside Amazon WorkSpaces.

I have been working with Amazon WorkSpaces for more than three years.

I would rate the stability of Amazon WorkSpaces as eight or nine out of ten.

Compute can be increased or decreased as you pay as you go for Amazon WorkSpaces. Multiple models are available. I would rate the scalability as eight out of ten.

I would rate the technical support from Amazon as nine out of ten. They provide good support.

Positive

The initial setup for Amazon WorkSpaces is simple.

Amazon WorkSpaces is a unique solution that can be compared with Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). A cost comparison between AVD and Amazon WorkSpaces would be helpful to understand the differences between the solutions.

I work with pricing through the pricing portal and calculator, but comparing prices is not my area of expertise.

My overall rating for Amazon WorkSpaces is 8 out of 10.

Amazon WorkSpaces is used to provide a consistent environment for remote workers for testing purposes. Software testing is typically run on those desktops.

Amazon WorkSpaces offers several best features including ease of access, security, scalability, anywhere access, and device flexibility. Support for multiple operating systems and workloads stands out in daily use.

The positive impact of Amazon WorkSpaces on the organization includes teams becoming productive on day one, reduced cost per employee, the ability for contractors to join instantly and leave without paying for the full term, easier compliance, lower risk of data loss, peace of mind when using contractors and remote staff, easier onboarding, easier offboarding, and security cleanup.

The benefit of easier onboarding and security cleanup is that no device recovery is needed, and there is no risk of data staying on ex-employee devices.

Desired improvements for Amazon WorkSpaces include faster and more flexible image updates, incremental image updates, patch-only updates, and a much faster push of software configuration changes to all workspaces, as well as improved cursor shutters and remote screen jitter.

Amazon WorkSpaces can sometimes function as a black box, making it difficult to diagnose why a workspace is slow on any given day due to limited visibility into network latency from the client, real-time CPU and GPU utilization, and storage bottlenecks. Improvements are needed for built-in performance dashboards, clearer latency metrics, connection health reports, and root cause suggestions that distinguish between local network and VPC issues.

Amazon WorkSpaces has been in use for 13 years.

The recommendation for others looking into using Amazon WorkSpaces is to decide whether a public cloud-only or hybrid setup with on-premises Active Directory is needed, standardize environments, optimize costs, pay attention to performance, manage security proactively, automate where possible, and test with real users. It is important to be aware of limitations, document policies and use cases, and consider future needs.

Amazon WorkSpaces is a strong suit for remote workspace enablement, providing a consistent environment, security, and flexibility. The review rating for this product is 8.

Whenever there is an issue or incident that happens with the server part, I will provide support.

We are using Amazon WorkSpaces for some tools and testing purposes.

We utilize the Workspace for running long-term scripting tasks.

I have used the persistent storage feature for users in Amazon WorkSpaces.

Persistent storage helps to maintain consistency and data availability across sessions.

The multi-factor authentication in Amazon WorkSpaces is a good security feature.

The product offers strong compliance and data security through multi-factor authentication.

I have not integrated AWS VPN with my Amazon WorkSpaces setup.

Regarding disadvantages, I feel that the product has no areas for improvement.

The billing part could be improved.

Some features could be added to the product in the future.

I have been working with Amazon WorkSpaces for five to six years.

It is easy to install Amazon WorkSpaces.

It is very stable.

I would give it a 10 for stability.

The solution is highly scalable.

I would give it a 10 for scalability as well.

There are three different plans for technical support from Amazon: Free, Standard, Professional, and Enterprise, and we have purchased the Enterprise support level.

I am happy with the support.

I would give a 10 for Amazon WorkSpaces support.

Positive

The last software I was using before I started working with SonicWall was Cisco Meraki.

I have been dealing with Meraki for almost eight to nine years.

I do not see any return on investment, time-wise or money-wise, with Amazon WorkSpaces.

For Amazon WorkSpaces pricing, I think it is affordable; it is a final decision made through the management part.

I am not satisfied with the billing part because sometimes it bills for huge usage we are not aware of when we trigger every EC2 instance or every RDS instance.

It deserves a seven-point rating for pricing because it is a bit expensive.

I am not comparing Amazon WorkSpaces to other products; this answer would be given by my manager.

My email is jitesh.rathod@apexon.com.

The service is a bit pricey.

There are challenges with billing for services such as RDS services, BigQuery services, and Kubernetes services.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Amazon WorkSpaces an 8.

It's like another virtual machine we want to access globally.

It support our remote work deployment.

It's easy to use.

The agent sometimes has connectivity issues, but otherwise, it's good.

I have been using it for over two years. 

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. There are around 300 end users using it in my company. 

The customer service and support are okay. The response time varies, it could be better. 

Positive

The initial setup is simple. It took a couple of hours. 

It's an end-user remote machine.

Integration capabilities: It is easy to integrate with other services. We can integrate with backup services, and monitoring agents.

I did it myself. 

It's easy to launch and set up. Productivity-wise, it's a very good product. It's easy to connect and troubleshoot.

The pricing is low. 

I can compare it with Nutanix VMs and Microsoft Cloud PCs. It's better.

I would recommend it. 

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

There are certain applications in media industry that we use it for which are only on either Windows or Linux platform. And we use MacBook pro for our office and laptop. So for those applications, we use Workspace.

Some of these applications are for very specific tasks, and there is not much other options available for many different platforms. We don’t use these applications regularly and it is more like for occasional use. So the pay as you go option from Amazon Workspace is very helpful for us.

The experience is seamless and there is no delay. The performance is very good. Initial startup times is a little bit of wait time, but it is bearable.

Making it more self-service friendly would be the implement I'd be looking for. When we have to add new applications, we have to go through the IT to do that, and they need to do some configuration changes. I believe they have to reevaluate the computation and storage and the memory. So this is this is something that as an unrequired and should be changed. Also, the initial start time takes couple of minutes and it is easy for get distracted during the time. So if it can reduce the start time to a reasonable start of time to a reasonable time of five to ten seconds. That will be great.

I have been using Amazon Workspaces for two years.

It's pretty stable. I have never experienced that crashes or closes when I'm using it. But if it is idle for few minutes, then it gets locked. So I actually, at that point, I have to reconnect again and that takes the initial start of time. So that's the downside, but I guess for the pay as you go if you're not using, then the resources are freed up. So that's probably the, you know, trade off here.

I believe the scalability is pretty good and, we did not have any issues so far. So we started with three, and then we asked our IT to add a few more as new team members came in, as they needed to use this. The IT was able to provide that almost immediately.

We contact our IT, and then in turn, if required, they would contact the Amazon support. So I have not contacted them directly

I have used Citrix, Dash, Microsoft 365 and VMware in the past.

Workspace was a good fit because of the security and the integration with Okta and IIM and was seamlessly integrated. Also from a price wise, I think this is better because of it came as a bundle. We've got bundle discount. Workspace was the best for our purposes

The initial setup is easy. The initial setup for my company was done by IT. So we were the user and once it was already set up and the process was added to the domain, then we just basically started using our credentials.

The initial setup for my company was done by my company’s IT department.

They have hourly and monthly pricing, and because our use case is, more of a sporadic use, so I go for hourly pricing. Again, the details of the pricing is handled by the procurement. From an end user perspective, pay as you use hourly is suitable

I would rate the overall solution nine out of ten, other than that initial delay. It kind of serves all the purpose that we need.

Regarding advice from a user's perspective, all you need to do is to have the account setup. You can do both ways. Like, you can use a browser to log in to the remote work space or you can have the application in your system, and then you can run it. After that, the experience is, like, using a Windows laptop or Windows desktop. So there is not much of a learning curve if someone have already used it. It is like normal Windows or Linux laptop.

It is easy to understand at the user interface level. The management console is very easy to use. 

As per the current condition, it is easy, but we are still new to it, so we are experiencing more and need to drill down to understand the alerts, environment, and causes.

So many custom policies are already built in. On-premises, we need to create each policy based on customer requirements. But here, more than 300 policies are already built in. We just need to pick and attach them to our policies. That is a benefit for us.

The infrastructure is readily available, with minimal latency, which each user can benefit from. That is a good thing.

It's very stable. There is a big difference between traditional physical servers and cloud servers. With physical servers, we need to plan for purchasing, procurement, capacity, storage, get quotations, and then procure them. That took some time. Maybe it would take more than one month or maybe two months to procure and then install. With AWS, it is readily available. 

Just pay and immediately create the VPC, network, and everything. It is very easy. Within two or three hours, we can implement any server or launch any application. Within five minutes, we can just spin up and publish our servers on the Internet.

There is always scope of improvement in the stability.

We recently started migration from on-premises server to this. We are new to this cloud field, so we're still experiencing and figuring out the costs, pros, and cons. 

But as per our current understanding and experience, it is very easy and readily available on the cloud.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. There is always scope of improvement in the stability. 

It is scalable. I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. We didn't face any issues with the scalability. 

It is very, very much easy to understand. With VPC, cloud, and S3 bucket storage, we just need to buy and attach the resources as per the requirement.

The integration is very much possible. We have two ways to achieve it: using a VPC or a direct link. We can integrate with both on-premises and AWS environments. Currently, we have implemented a site-to-site VPN, not the direct link. 

One major benefit is the readily available infrastructure. In a shared environment, you can have a database ready within minutes with just a few clicks. This is a significant advantage for faster launching of solutions and is easier compared to on-premises setups.

The pricing is based on consumption. You pay for each process based on the transactions you make.

The investment is almost the same as having your own on-premises solution, with the added costs of server administration, hardware resources, and maintenance. However, there are some cheaper solutions available on the AWS website.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I would recommend to explore all cloud solutions, including Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud. They all offer good options for cloud computing.

It's on a remote desktop. Currently, we need to operate on physical laptops and physical desktops. For organizational purposes, everything will be on the Cloud. In that cloud environment, we will use AWS, which is a cloud environment. 

In that cloud environment, we will create one virtual machine that has the credentials for working professionals. Working users will simply need to log on to their laptops or systems. They need to connect to that particular virtual machine, the Amazon WorkSpaces virtual machine, with their own credentials. They need to do all office-related work. Everything will be inside that workspace only. Safe and secure.

The best feature is that it operates very quickly. It depends on the regional location. If we choose a nearby location, nearby servers, it will be best for users to use.

Amazon WorkSpaces needs to improve on releasing the most number of patches immediately as quickly as possible. And they need to enable more USB options to connect a mobile phone to that particular workspace. 

It will be useful for some developers and some testers, and it is currently not available in AWS Workspace. And some augmentations for all the organizations today, if the organization is in a base plan, they need to give a proper response in four hours, so support can improve, which will be better for a small-scale organization also. 

They have a plan starting from the base plan, but they are not giving support for that plan. So, they are not giving product support. They will respond after 24 hours, but only for billing-related information. 

Technical engineers will not join there for technical queries. We have to change from a base plan to some other organizational plan, and it's a fresh plan. Like the plans we need to subscribe to, we also need to spend the basic price. This is not a good thing. If they improve, it will be better for AWS.

I have been using this solution for the last four months. 

It is a stable product. It is based on the user's internet connectivity; if the internet connection is fine, then the product will be fine. 

It is a pay-as-you-go model. We can increase and decrease the specification as per our needs. 

So, it is a scalable product. Currently, we have 20 end users. But we have plans to increase the count in future. 

We need to spend some amount for the support.

Without money, they won't respond. 

Negative

We chose Amazon WorkSpaces because it aligns with our company's cloud-first strategy.

As a startup, we don't have the resources to manage physical laptops for our users. It's impractical to allocate manpower for IT support, especially in a work-from-home environment.

We needed a solution that could provide quick and efficient remote support to our end users. Amazon WorkSpaces offered the perfect solution with its cloud-based, secure, and scalable infrastructure. It's easy to manage and maintain, and it provides a seamless experience for our users, whether they're working from home or the office.

The initial setup is easy. 

We have to pay extra for support. And it is expensive. But the overall licensing costs are okay. 

It is a pay-as-you-go model. I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap. 

We were not using any other product before AWS WorkSpaces. We did evaluate some other products, such as Azure Virtual Desktop, but we ultimately decided that AWS WorkSpaces was the best fit for our needs.

If you are looking for a cloud-based solution that is secure, scalable, and easy to manage, then Amazon WorkSpaces is a good option. However, if you have a limited budget or require more extensive support, then you may want to consider other options.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We just create a computer on the cloud, then create a visual desktop VDI, and set a connection, username, and password. That user connects to the VDI machine on AWS with very limited access to a static application, and then they start to work for that company. When a company terminates the agent, it can then terminate the VDR and create a new VDR for the new agent.

We can deploy it in different regions. We had a lot of agents working outside of the US. It works in China and Malaysia. We can create a VDI for a different agent on AWS and assign that to the user. It has good speed and connects well with computers.

I have been using Amazon WorkSpaces for two years. 

It is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable product. Presently, four hundred users are using the solution. 

The technical support team is good. 

Positive

We switched because of the price offered by Amazon. 

The initial setup was somewhat difficult. We needed a lot of testing time. We needed to have a domain controller in that region. It's not a one-two-three configuration. But, it can be easy.

Price-wise Amazon Workspaces is cheaper than most services available. 

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

We use the solution to provide people with a virtual workspace. 

The tool has low latency and multimedia support. For instance, running Zoom calls on Amazon WorkSpaces seamlessly supports local microphones, speakers, and web cameras. This feature is transparent for applications, allowing me to use the Zoom application without requiring exceptional support for remote web cameras or microphones. Amazon WorkSpaces provides this functionality at the operating system level, enabling effortless video conferencing. To my knowledge, Microsoft Remote Desktop does not offer the same support.

The product needs to improve its pricing. It should also improve corporate identity management and single sign-on.

I have been working with the product for two years. 

I rate Amazon Workspace's stability a nine out of ten. 

My company has around 1000 users. 

Two resources handle deployment and maintenance. 

The tool's pricing depends on company turnover and the organization's relationship with Amazon. I rate it a six out of ten. 

I rate the tool a seven out of ten. 

We are a work-from-home company, permanently working from home. Sometimes our employees face issues with their laptops. So we configure Amazon WorkSpaces for them, and they download the Amazon WorkSpace client on their computer, then log in to that. The solution provides our employees with a virtual desktop environment. We use Amazon WorkSpaces as an alternative to laptops.

Amazon WorkSpaces is very fast. You get the response very fast and feel like you are working on your own computer.

Amazon WorkSpaces is a little different from a laptop or a normal computer that you have. When we configured our workspace and some people tried to install the programming language Python, they couldn't. Downloading a software solution from the internet and installing it wasn't so easy, and they had to do some additional configurations inside Amazon WorkSpaces to install external software. You cannot install external applications without doing some additional configurations inside the solution as opposed to your normal desktop or laptop. Also, deleting and creating a workspace sometimes takes a few minutes with the solution, and it would be good if they could speed that up.

We used Amazon WorkSpaces for one year.

Amazon WorkSpaces is a stable product, and nobody has faced any issues with the solution.

We had around 10 people using Amazon WorkSpaces.

Amazon WorkSpaces’ initial setup is very easy.

You don't need to use Amazon WorkSpaces if you have a good-functioning laptop. Since the solution connects to another computer through your laptop, it won't be as fast as yours. Amazon WorkSpaces provides the facility to encrypt your laptop or hard disk for security reasons. It is easier to enable encryption on a recent laptop like Windows or Mac than on an older laptop that uses older versions of the OS and the hard drive. Amazon WorkSpace provides a convenient option to enable encryption, where you have to check a tick mark when creating it.

Overall, I rate Amazon WorkSpaces an eight out of ten.