While VMware Horizon provides a powerful virtualization platform, technologies and capabilities like Microsoft Windows, Active Directory, authentication, DNS, network, group policy, and third-party apps must work seamlessly to provide a great digital employee experience. This eBook will focus on improving the logon duration for EUC and VDI deployments.

And view this solution page for more information. 

Since 2016, many users have turned to Apache Guacamole, a community-driven open-source remote desktop platform that is free for anyone to use and if your organization is technically savvy. The source code is publicly available to compile and build.

However, if you’d like software that’s ready to deploy for the enterprise and comes with responsive, professional support, Keeper Connection Manager (KCM) can provide an affordable way to get all the benefits of Apache Guacamole.

KCM provides users with a secure and reliable way to remotely connect to their machines using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), Virtual Network Computing (VNC), Secure Shell (SSH) and other common protocols. Moreover, KCM is backed by a responsive team, including the original creators of Apache Guacamole, ensuring expert assistance is always available.

Let’s dive into the importance and challenges of remote access below.

IDC’s 21-page Business Value Solution Brief, The Business Value of Forward Networks (doc #US52128624, June 2024), quantifies how the vendor’s network-digital-twin platform turns insight into hard cash. 

IDC interviewed enterprises that had run Forward Enterprise for roughly three years and mapped their operational KPIs to its Business Value model, converting them into annualised dollars and full-time-equivalent (FTE) hours.
$14.2 million in average annual benefits, broken down into $7.7 M from greater stability and reliability, $2.9 M from staff productivity and $3.6 M from other operational efficiencies.

95.8 FTEs worth of time returned each year.

33 % fewer unplanned-downtime incidents and 55 % faster mean-time-to-repair, preventing about 180 000 hours of lost productivity.

Incident-response teams work 34 % faster; compliance/audit tasks 10 % faster.

Network deployments finish 71 % sooner; change-planning/testing is 36 % faster; production fixes arrive 44 % faster.

Forward Enterprise builds a mathematically exact, continuously updated digital twin of multi-vendor, hybrid-cloud networks. Engineers query reachability, policy and configuration drift in seconds and run “what-if” simulations before changes. This eliminates manual CLI hunts, shortens root-cause analysis, prevents misconfigurations and surfaces licence waste, underpinning the monetised savings above.

Customers also reported quicker security investigations (thanks to instant path analysis), smoother cloud migrations, clearer executive-level reporting and higher team morale as reactive “fire-fighting” declined.

IDC concludes that the platform typically pays for itself in under twelve months and then delivers a durable, measurable ROI. For organisations wrestling with complex, hybrid networks, a digital-twin strategy emerges as both an operations accelerator and a business enabler, aligning network health with broader risk-reduction and growth objectives.

• Hypervisor Integration: Seamless integration for better performance and scalability.
• Cost Efficiency:  Eliminates expensive server hardware and storage controllers.
• Built-in Deduplication: Core-level deduplication for minimal performance impact, maximum efficiency, and significant cost savings.
• Intelligent Hardware Failure Protection: Enhanced resilience with data copies across multiple nodes and drives.
• Advanced Snapshot Capabilities: Unlimited, efficient and independent snapshots.

Discover the Essential Guide to VMware Migration

Transitioning from VMware to VergeOS requires careful planning to minimize disruption. Our guide provides a structured process for a smooth migration:

Key Sections of the Guide

1. Evaluation of Alternatives
   - Research and Trial: Identify and test virtualization solutions for performance, compatibility, features, and support.
   - Cost-Benefit Analysis: Compare costs and calculate ROI to evaluate benefits over VMware.

2. Planning the Migration
   - Detailed Plan: Outline timelines, resource allocation, and risk management.
   - Infrastructure Preparation: Ensure hardware and network compatibility

3. Execution and Post-Migration
   - Pilot Migration: Start with non-critical systems to test the process.
   - Full-Scale Migration: Schedule during low-usage periods, back up data, and execute the migration.
   - Post-Migration Testing: Verify functional and performance standards in the new environment.

4. Phased Migration Process
- Backup/DR: Use VergeOS for cost-effective backup and disaster recovery of the VMware environment.
- NAS Replacement: Replace Network Attached Storage with VergeOS.
- Testing: Test workloads for compatibility and performance.
- Conversion: Incrementally convert virtual machines, starting with low-priority workloads.

Download the full guide now to optimize your virtualization strategy.

Enterprises facing rapidly growing backup demands and ever shrinking windows of opportunity need to rethink their data protection strategies. ExaGrid is the ideal solution as the Tiered Backup Storage systems deliver a smart scale-out solution, and the latest EX189 model takes density into the stratosphere with an industry-leading 12PB of raw backup capacity in 64U of rack space.

ExaGrid’s EX appliances are a natural choice for enterprise data backup and disaster recovery as they deliver an easily deployed, highly flexible and high performing scale-out storage solution. Their innovative data protection features keep ransomware attacks at bay and ExaGrid’s flagship EX189 appliance offers a huge backup capacity that defies belief.

• Why VMware’s approach to SDN stalled adoption due to licensing fees, complexity, and hardware overhead.
• How VergeFabric, built into VergeOS, eliminates the need for dedicated SDN appliances or controller VMs.
• The advantages of VM-level segmentation and VDC-level security without VLAN sprawl or manual firewall rules.
• How VergeOS extends cost savings beyond the hypervisor by integrating compute, storage, and networking into a single platform.
• Why multi-site connectivity and disaster recovery are simplified with built-in SDN.

Forward Networks co-founder Nikhil Handigol explains how organisations can harness agentic AI in networking and security without jeopardising reliability.

What makes AI “agentic” – Unlike chatbots, agentic systems pursue goals, choose their own tools and act autonomously. Market researchers expect the segment to surge from US $5.1 billion in 2025 to more than US $47 billion by 2030, and Gartner predicts that one-third of enterprise software will embed such capabilities by 2028. 

Upside for networks – Agents can:
remediate newly disclosed vulnerabilities or block malicious traffic,
resolve connectivity issues and reroute flows around failures,
analyse patterns to predict and prevent impending outages.
 
These abilities promise dramatic efficiency gains for short-staffed IT teams and better user experience.        
Risks to manage – Because an agent can act without human oversight, a mis-trained model or bad data could break compliance, introduce downtime or even cause physical harm. “Trust but verify” must therefore guide every deployment.

Build the data bedrock – 
Autonomy is only as sound as the data it relies on. Enterprises need a complete, accurate record of every device, configuration and packet path. A network digital twin—a mathematically precise, continuously updated software replica of the live environment—provides that single source of truth.
 
Digital twins as guardrails
Pre-change simulation: Before any AI-driven or manual change, test it exhaustively in the twin to catch policy violations, compliance breaks or connectivity loss.

Continuous verification: Twin-based rules monitor live behaviour and alert operators to drift or emergent problems. With this safety layer, CIOs can accelerate agentic AI adoption while preserving control.

Bottom line – Agentic AI’s promise in networking is real, but benefits accrue only if robust data pipelines and digital-twin guardrails are in place. When those prerequisites are met, AI agents can handle routine operations and incident response, freeing humans for higher-value work and increasing organisational resilience. 

GigaOm’s “Radar for Network Validation” (2024) addresses the growing need for enterprise-grade network assurance tools that validate architecture intent, enforce policies, and ensure compliance. The report establishes clear metrics—such as source-of-truth fidelity, breadth of validation, simulation capabilities, and ease of integration—as foundational evaluation criteria.

In this latest edition, Forward Networks is ranked as a top-tier “Outperformer” for the third consecutive year, earning placement close to the coveted “bullseye” that denotes market leadership. The report highlights Forward Enterprise’s strengths:
Scalable Modeling & Path Analysis: A mathematically accurate digital twin can model state across 50,000+ devices and diverse public-cloud deployments, simulating end-to-end paths across Layers 2–4 and even Layer 7. This enables exhaustive pre-change validation and forensic path tracing.

Compliance & Security Verification: The platform verifies that configurations adhere to compliance standards and security policies before deployment.

Hybrid-Cloud Flexibility: Forward supports complex environments spanning on-premises and cloud infrastructures.

Visualization & Forensics: Users can query network state “like a database,” visualize flows, and trace live or historical behavior to troubleshoot or investigate incidents.

Why Forward stands out: GigaOm praises its technical excellence, calling out its performance across end-to-end validation, compliance/security verification, hybrid cloud support, and rich visualization features that outpace most of its 13 peer vendors.