itopia Cloud Automation Stack: Features & Capabilities

Table of Contents

Automated Provisioning for Desktops & Apps

Orchestrate your deployment

With a few simple clicks, itopia orchestrates the configuration of your entire cloud deployment, including GCP’s network, firewall, computing, and storage configurations. itopia’s automation will provision your Microsoft RDS infrastructure on Google Cloud, including Active Directory, Group Policy Objects, RD Gateways, RD Brokers, RD Web, RD Licensing, RD Session Hosts, and File Servers — all within a matter of minutes.

Secure your Active Directory

Utilize our Trusted AD to connect with your on-premises AD and extend a Google Cloud-based solution for seamless connectivity to your cloud environment — ensuring global business continuity. All users and security groups are replicated and synced to GCP, without ever compromising the security of your on-premises AD.

Stand up RDS Environments

Creating RDS environments with itopia is automated, and you can configure VMs according your preferences through an intuitive, wizard-based console. With itopia, you can create a new or extend an existing Active Directory, use best practice GPOs for optimal security and compliance, and and automatically configure OS, network, firewall, and more.

Complete Environment Control with a Single, Unified Console

itopia is designed to help organizations manage all aspects of their GCP workload lifecycle through a single control panel across multiple regions and GCP projects. All activities related to deployment and management of core IT environments are managed through a central dashboard. This unified approach provides visibility into your organization’s entire GCP footprint, helping you control costs and optimize your environment. itopia’s agentless approach automates the day-to-day tasks of IT management and provides continued visibility as workloads grow within your own GCP account. Additionally, itopia automatically determines each user’s location and routes them to a Collection Pool in the most accessible region. This ensures the lowest latency and highest user satisfaction.

Custom Image Creation & Management

With itopia, you can import existing images that you’ve used on-prem, or quickly and easily install apps with our custom image builder tool, built right into our unified console. When your image is complete, itopia can automatically apply the image and autoscale to all session host VMs within the specified collection pool.

Identity & Access Management

With a centralized, unified console, itopia makes it easy for you to govern user access and group management.

  • Effortlessly create new users or import them from your Active Directory – or, you can extend your on-premises Active Directory directly into Google Cloud.
  • Assign user groups to collections with designated Windows apps and permissions, and make them accessible anywhere they’re needed, across multiple regions.
  • Easily restrict app access per-user and serve a customized app selection to every worker each time they log into a remote session. You can update their desktops as needed, too, so you can onboard employees, remote workers, temps and contractors quickly. Lastly, you can disable applications per certain users or groups.

Autoscaled & Customizable Collection Pools

itopia gathers multiple VMs into a software-defined “collection pools,” regardless of the workload types of the individual VMs. Collection Pools are fully customizable and automatically scale their individual VMs as needed. When CPU, RAM and storage demands scale up and down, itopia’s collection pool dynamically meets those needs so you’ll always have the right resources without waste. OS and app images within Collection Pools can be customized, and they can be accessible across multiple regions with simple to manage user connection settings such as Session Timeout.

With itopia and GCP, you can choose from a selection of VM types to optimize the performance of your app and reduce overall costs. You can also create custom instances where you completely control the amount of CPU and memory allocated to the VM. Users will access all their resources through Microsoft RDP protocol.

itopia autoscaling can be tailored to your specific needs, and you can take the automatic session host creation to the next level using custom images.

Scheduled & Dynamic VM Uptime

Google Cloud bills on a per second basis for computing resources. Scheduled Uptime can start and stop individual VMs conveniently according to a preset schedule. Useful for shutting down unneeded compute resources on weekends or off-peak hours. If your company works during regular business hours, you can schedule VMs to turn on at 8am and turn off at 8pm, reducing the hours consumed in a month by half.

With Dynamic Uptime, itopia will monitor the number of active users and ensure that adequate VMs are in place, cycling down unneeded computing capacity and reducing your costs. By keeping only the necessary number of VMs active, Dynamic Uptime can reduce compute costs significantly.

Easily Managed File Shares

You’ll manage file shares from a single, centralized location, defining the folder structure and permissions that are best suited to your environment. Then, you can automatically assign mapped drives to users and groups, including Windows File Server and NetApp Cloud Volumes. In fact, itopia’s native integration provides a high performance, fully managed file server option with support for both NFS and SMB protocols.

Redundant Snapshots for Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

Itopia captures full VM snapshots using schedule and version retention policies that you can easily define and manage. A snapshot is an exact copy of your disk at a point in time and is used to backup a full image of your persistent disks. itopia gives you the ability to create automated schedules to take snapshots and manage them according to your retention criteria.Snapshots can quickly restore one or more VMs to a prior point-in-time configuration, assuring secure and continuously available services. You’ll be insulated from server-wide failures and will have the peace of mind of a powerful backup tool that’s there when you need it.

Insights & Analytics with BigQuery

itopia directly integrates with BigQuery, so you’ll gain a steady stream of insights from itopia’s analytics dashboard to review historical user behaviors and computing activity. You can monitor, for example, session lengths per user, app usage frequency, and file access data, as well as view a breakdown of all GCP consumption costs.