With the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting life, more people than ever are suddenly working from home. For employers, especially in healthcare, there’s pressure to enable this transition without compromising compliance or efficiency.
Thankfully, Amazon has stepped up to offer free subscriptions to Amazon WorkSpaces for organizations with up to 50 users from April 1 through June 30, 2020.
What Is Amazon WorkSpaces?
Workspaces is a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution within the AWS cloud that aims to close the gap between in-office and at-home work. The solution enables users to log into a work computer from home on a PC, tablet, or even a smartphone and securely access company applications and data without having to download or store anything.
WorkSpaces works by connecting to your company’s VPC through an IP address that’s assigned to it from the DHCP service provided by your VPC. This gives you access to any resource in the VPC and to any network that is connected to your VPC (via a VPC peering, an AWS Direct Connect connection, or VPN connection). We recommend using a separate VPC specifically for your WorkSpaces deployment. With a separate VPC, you can specify the necessary governance and security guardrails for your WorkSpaces by creating traffic separation.
WorkSpaces supports both Windows and Linux and is a HIPAA compliant solution.
How Much Does It Cost?
Beginning April 1, AWS is offering Amazon WorkSpaces for up to 50 users at no charge for new WorkSpaces customers. This offer is available through June 30, 2020. This offer will include the Standard, Value, and Performance bundles.
WorkSpaces provides the flexibility to pay monthly or hourly. The charges for the service apply monthly. With monthly billing, you pay a fixed monthly fee for unlimited usage during the month.
With hourly billing, you pay a small fixed monthly fee per WorkSpace to cover infrastructure costs and storage, and a low hourly rate for each hour you use the WorkSpace during the month.
You can also mix monthly billing with hourly billing within your AWS account, and you can switch between billing options at any time during a billing period to optimize your AWS bill.
How Can Cloudticity Help?
Cloudticity has extensive experience with WorkSpaces across our current customer base and knows the best ways to implement, configure, and troubleshoot them with HIPAA compliance top of mind.
In addition, Cloudticity can deploy automation in your account that analyzes all of your WorkSpace usage data and automatically converts the WorkSpace to the most cost-effective billing option (hourly or monthly), depending on your usage, which helps drive maximum cost savings.
If you want to learn more about how we can help set up and manage a WorkSpaces deployment that works for you, reach out to us.
