Servers That Sleep — 100-Seat RDS on Google Cloud
Real Estate Company (100+ employees)
The Challenge
A real estate company with 100+ employees ran a hundred physical PCs — each loaded with AutoCAD, softphone (Zoiper), Microsoft Office, and Chrome. Every desktop was a risk: personal apps like WhatsApp and YouTube ate bandwidth and productivity, licensing and repairs were constant costs, and brokers carried laptops full of unversioned, unsynced documents.
What We Did
Remote Desktop Services in Google Cloud: Session Hosts with a golden image (AutoCAD, softphone, Office, Chrome), Connection Broker, and RD Gateway for secure HTTPS access from anywhere — no VPN
Session Hosts split into pools: a CAD pool on high-core VMs for designers, and an office pool for everyone else
RD Gateway with MFA for all remote access — office, home, or site
URL filtering and Group Policy to block WhatsApp Web and social media on the work desktop
File servers with quotas and versioning — brokers stop losing documents
Three-tier power plan: 24×7 core (domain controllers, RD Gateway, file servers), 9–6 Mon–Sat business-hours tier via native GCP Instance Schedules, and on-demand CAD pools with a 15-minute idle auto-shutdown watchdog
Key Outcomes
~40% reduction in compute cost. Servers auto-stop 15 minutes after the last user logs out. Zero PCs to maintain on site. WhatsApp and social media restricted via URL filtering and Group Policy.
Highlights
Real Estate Company (100+ employees)
Real Estate / RDS
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