Ian Lee Most modern IT teams are working under a reality that is very different from the early cloud migration fantasy. Whilst initial plans often aimed for complete public cloud adoption, practical realities have led most teams to architect hybrid VDI environments that combine cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
Having done extensive work with these hybrid deployments, I’ve found that it’s more beneficial to view this as a strategic direction rather than a temporary workaround. It’s better to view hybrid infrastructure as an intentional strategy that gives you increased benefits when implemented correctly.
In this context, Parallels RAS and ControlUp form a powerful combination. Together, they deliver a complete solution that simplifies hybrid VDI management, improves digital employee experience (DEX), and provides the operational intelligence required to scale efficiently.
The Strategic Advantage of Hybrid VDI
There are numerous reasons why the adoption of hybrid infrastructure is long-lasting in organizations I’ve worked with. Traditional applications often create migration challenges that exceed existing budgets or timelines. Regulations and laws also commonly require certain data to be kept within specific geographic boundaries or in the direct reach of organizations. Some workloads also perform better when deployed closer to users or in conjunction with data from other systems.
Suppose a manufacturing company plans to migrate its entire VDI setup to the cloud. After reviewing, they may learn that their production control systems require latency levels possible only through local deployment. Instead of settling for performance trade-offs, such a company can follow a hybrid approach, whereby mission-critical workloads remain on-premises and run-of-the-mill office applications are shifted to the cloud.
This type of strategic deployment enables organizations to leverage cloud advantages, such as cost savings and elasticity, for specific workloads while maintaining control over mission-critical systems. The challenge is to manage this complexity effectively.
Parallels RAS: Designed for Hybrid Simplicity
Having tried numerous VDI platforms in the past, I’ve noticed that a lot of them were first built for single-environment deployment before they were optimized for cloud infrastructure. Parallels RAS has been designed with hybrid in mind.
The environment-agnostic design of the platform ensures that management processes are identical regardless of whether resources are deployed on Azure, AWS, or on-premises infrastructure. It applies equally well to end-user experience, too, so that desktop and application performance are the same regardless of the hosting location.
What makes Parallels RAS stand out is its streamlined deployment model, with rapid provisioning capabilities and centralized policy control that eliminates the overhead typically associated with hybrid environments.
You don’t have to change management methods or create bespoke configurations for each environment—the same tool and workflows apply everywhere. New capacity can be deployed quickly in cloud environments for short-term projects, with sensitive workloads staying on-premises without separate management methods.
ControlUp: Visibility and Intelligent Action
To manage hybrid environments effectively, visibility is required into all components simultaneously. Many monitoring solutions are good at either cloud or on-premises environments, or virtual or local endpoints, but fail to deliver unified insights to show the full story. ControlUp bridges that divide with true cross-platform visibility across hybrid deployments.
Through real-time monitoring and historical analytics, ControlUp lets you pinpoint the root causes of performance issues, whether it’s a local resource bottleneck, a cloud latency spike, or user-specific anomalies. This visibility drives faster troubleshooting and smarter planning.
But ControlUp is more than just observability. It’s actionable intelligence. Automated remediation workflows handle recurring issues—like service restarts or resource cleanups—without requiring human input. This is especially critical in hybrid setups, where IT staff may not be physically present in every location.
And with advanced capacity planning features, ControlUp enables proactive scaling and resource distribution, helping organizations avoid overprovisioning or underutilization across environments. The integration enables ControlUp monitoring and analytics to inform Parallels RAS resource allocation decisions, allowing hybrid environments to be truly manageable at scale.
Operationally, unified management interfaces make life much easier. Instead of correlating across multiple management consoles, administrators gain a consolidated view of their hybrid infrastructure, making typical day-to-day operations and incident response much easier.
The joint value of Parallels and ControlUp lies in their combined use as an integrated solution. While each platform possesses strong, independent functionality, their integration creates functionality that is more than either platform could create alone.
Practical Implementation Examples
To demonstrate how this platform convergence can yield concrete advantages, consider these potential scenarios:
- Rapid Remediation: When end users at a given site experience a performance issue, ControlUp analytics may indicate that the issue is caused by network latency to cloud resources rather than application performance. At this point, administrators can use Parallels RAS to redirect affected users to local data center resources while the network team resolves connectivity problems. This type of rapid remediation can reduce typical multi-day-long troubleshooting cycles to hours.
- Cost Optimization: This is another area where integration would be valuable. If repeated over-provisioning in cloud infrastructures is identified by ControlUp analytics at specific times during the day, organizations can implement more stringent scaling policies in Parallels RAS. This optimization can help save 20-30% of cloud costs whilst delivering an excellent user experience.
- Compliance Reporting: For compliance reporting, the logging and monitoring between both environments would reduce audit processes to a significantly simpler mode. Rather than correlating data across disparate systems, organizations could generate detailed reports of their entire infrastructure from a single source.
Scalable Growth Management
One of the most difficult issues with a hybrid infrastructure is dynamically scaling across different environments. Organizations require the flexibility to add capacity, where and when it is needed, without introducing additional management complexity.
This challenge is met by the Parallels RAS and ControlUp solution through predictive analytics and adaptable deployment capabilities. ControlUp’s trend analysis enables the detection of scale requirements before they become apparent to users, while RAS allows the deployment of extra capacity in the optimal environment.
This approach becomes particularly valuable for organizations with irregular workloads due to seasonal factors, like accounting firms during tax season, retailers during the holidays, and schools during enrollment periods. These all benefit from the ability to rapidly expand cloud resources during usage peaks while maintaining stable on-premises assets for baseline performance.
Future Considerations
Both technologies continue evolving, with their roadmaps predicting that hybrid environment management will become increasingly sophisticated. AI-based optimization, stronger automation capabilities, and closer alignment with cloud-native services will make hybrid operations increasingly efficient.
For companies making VDI infrastructure investments today, it has become essential to select solutions that will evolve to address changing needs. The tech landscape continues to accelerate, and business requirements show no signs of settling.
Implementation Recommendations
I recommend not trying to make all of your requirements fit into a single delivery model. Instead, companies should adopt a strategic hybrid approach and select tools that can manage this strategy well.
The Parallels RAS and ControlUp partnership is a great approach to managing hybrid VDI. This solution offers scalability, visibility, and control to enable successful hybrid operations.
Success begins with having a clear understanding of organizational requirements and constraints and then developing solutions that are flexible enough to evolve with changing needs. Hybrid infrastructure administration is decidedly easier with the proper tools and thoughtful methodology.
The general takeaway from working with hybrid infrastructure is that embracing these facts results in better outcomes than attempting to eradicate them entirely.
Ready to make your hybrid users happier and more productive while gaining more visibility into your organization’s VDI environment? See how Parallels RAS and ControlUp make hybrid environments better together.
