Dane Young
Virtualization Practice Manager
Entisys360
In March 2017, Entisys360 is officially launching Entisys360 Workspace Cloud, a fully-managed, subscription-based digital workspace that runs on any public or private cloud. The Entisys360 Workspace Cloud solution goes beyond Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Desktop-as-a-Service, and is a robust digital workspace offering. We sat down with Dane Young, Virtualization Practice Manager at Entisys360, to learn more about the Entisys360 Workspace Cloud offering. We were pleased to learn how the offering has all of the functionality that mid-market and enterprise organizations need to make mobility, application and desktop virtualization a likeable, lovable experience.
Q: Let’s begin the conversation by asking how Entisys360 defines Workspace-as-a-Service?
A: Cloud computing is driving enterprises to re-think IT. Numerous statistics and projections from the industry’s leading analyst firms demonstrate the shift from traditional on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based services. Analysts predict, in fact, that in the next couple of years more than half of the applications running in public cloud environments will be considered mission critical by the organizations that use them. Furthermore, analysts expect than more than a third of new software investments being made by the world’s largest vendors will shift from cloud-first to cloud-only.
Through Entisys360 Workspace Cloud, we are helping our clients embrace desktop transformation through a digital workspace that empowers and drives workforce productivity by providing their end-users with always-on, anytime access to applications, desktops, and mobility via any device, from anywhere in the world.
Entisys360 Workspace Cloud is an integral component of our “Cloud First” strategy, which is defined by our commitment to remain at the forefront of technology innovation, and stay one step ahead of our clients by meeting tomorrow’s business needs, today.
It is important to note that we do not define Entisys360 Workspace Cloud as a VDI or Desktop-as-a-Service solution, but rather a fully-functioning workspace environment that enables IT organizations to embrace public, private, and hybrid cloud-based infrastructures.
Q: How does Entisys360 Workspace Cloud deliver on “Cloud First” business priorities?
A: Entisys360 Workspace Cloud is available as a private or public cloud subscription-based service model. Because there is no need to invest in new on-premises infrastructure to support this model, Entisys360 can shift the burden from CAPEX costs to the more predictable OPEX costs, while at the same time helping our clients develop strategies for migrating away from existing CAPEX infrastructure and toward a “Cloud First” mindset.
Q: What are some of the current challenges and market dynamics that are driving the need for solutions like Entisys360 Workspace Cloud?
A: With today’s workforce becoming increasingly mobile, end users want access to their workspaces, desktops, applications and data from any device, on any network, and located anywhere in the world. Furthermore, IT organizations of all sizes are restructuring their facilities to adapt to increasing mobility and employees being away from their desks between 50 and 60 percent of the time.
This can make it difficult to provide support, and many IT organizations struggle to provide premium services to their end-users while “keeping the lights on,” which means making sure infrastructure is up-to-date, security risks are minimized, and compliance is maintained.
Some of the key challenges they face include:
- Addressing workforce mobility can be difficult to budget, justify and plan due to varying CAPEX and OPEX costs;
- Coping with the rigidity of traditional infrastructure and virtualizations solutions when it comes to scalability and addressing consumption;
- Having the skills required to manage infrastructure and virtualization solutions create additional burden on existing teams;
- Ensuring consistency, performance, and reliability for end user experience is crucial for adoption and growth; and,
- Taking into account additional cost factors when considering datacenter availability, business continuity and disaster recovery.
Entisys360 Workspace Cloud addresses all of these challenges and shifts the responsibility for routine and mundane IT tasks away from IT organizations so that they can focus on higher-value IT initiatives.
Q: Why should IT organizations leverage Entisys360 Workspace Cloud?
A: At Entisys360, we believe that virtual workspaces should function in a way that maximizes uptime, promotes optimal productivity, and performs in accordance with our clients’ business requirements.
Leveraging core Citrix technologies hosted entirely by Entisys360, Workspace Cloud delivers a complete and reliable user experience, enables on-demand scalability that addresses unpredictable changes in the business and consumption patterns, supports migration of on-premises apps to the cloud, all while minimizing the pain typically associated with updating antiquated virtual infrastructure technologies.
The result is an immediate time-to-value for our clients.
Q: How does Entisys360 Workspace Cloud improve time to value for IT enterprises?
A: Entisys360 Workspace Cloud features a customizable enterprise workflow automation solution with a user self-service portal that provides greater speed for IT organizations to rapidly deliver services to end-users. No longer will it take days or even weeks to provision virtual applications or desktops – instead, once the IT organizations is onboard with Entisys360 Workspace Cloud, new workspaces can be quickly provisioned with the simple click of a button. Furthermore, IT organizations no longer have to worry about high availability, scalability or maintaining software updates.
Q: What are the key benefits afforded by Entisys360 Workspace-as-a-Service?
A: Entisys360 Workspace Cloud is built on a platform that is designed to securely deliver hosted applications, desktops, and mobility by leveraging private, public and hybrid cloud technologies. Core services and infrastructure are hosted Tier 3 and Tier 4 rated datacenters connected by a 320Gbps ultra high speed rated network and fully compliant with SOC 2 Type 2 audits performed annually for customers who are regulated by HIPAA, PCI, GLB or SOX.
Additionally, Entisys360 Workspace Cloud, organizations have the ability to expand to ANY AWS or Azure region when needed to dynamically provide additional cloud capacity on demand for peak usage, as well as the flexibility to recoup existing investments by leveraging a bring-your-own-license model for any products included in the solution (i.e. Citrix, Microsoft, RES Software, and more).
For Bring-Your-Own Datacenter scenarios, Entisys360 Workspace Cloud enables organizations to expand to global co-locations or on-premises to customer environments. The offering also utilizes co-locations and customer datacenters and/or private cloud for hosting legacy infrastructure or other workloads, supported as a managed service. IT organizations can also gain access to a variety of hardware offerings, generic or purpose built to meet requirements, including NVIDIA GRID vGPU, HPE Moonshot with Intel or AMD Graphics, and other leading solutions not available in the public cloud, and they have the ability to leverage the Citrix technology stack to deliver virtual desktops, applications, networking and mobility management to their users.
Q: What are some of the key components of Entisys360 Workspace-as-a-Service?
A: Entisys360 Workspace Cloud is available in a shared multi-tenant, partially dedicated, or fully dedicated single tenant Citrix infrastructure. The offering leverages a robust set of premium tools including Enterprise Workflow Automation and a Self-Service Store; supports efficient onboarding for painless adoption, user migrations and consumption growth with the flexibility to start small and expand the deployment as demand increases; and, is coupled with the industry’s leading technology services organization to provide end-to-end assessments, design, implementation, migration and support, completely tailored to meet our client’s business objectives.
Through Entisys360 Workspace Cloud, we are also able to help IT organizations align their business initiatives with evolving industry trends and better understand the impact that future technologies will have on IT business value.
Q: What can clients expect when they sign up for Entisys360 Workspace Cloud? Is there a standard engagement process?
As the industry’s leading technology services organization, Entisys360 has a mature delivery methodology that we employ when engaging with our clients. Each engagement begins through envisioning whereby we work with our clients to explore and identify their organization’s interests, challenges, requirements and strategies as they relate to workforce enablement in a digital workspace. During this stage, we help them explore the possibilities of this solution, both present and future and as it applies to the requirements of the business in delivering an always on workspace that is accessible from anywhere and on any device.
Once the vision has been defined and mapped to the requirements of the business, we then move through the Entisys360 Workspace Cloud delivery methodology, which starts with a strategic planning phase to define goals, objectives, requirements, and provide a roadmap for digital workspace initiatives.
The assessment phase follows and during this time we evaluate the clients’ current IT environment and existing infrastructure. Our expert Professional Services team will provide architecture and design services to map the goals, objectives and requirements to design decisions in the Entisys360 Workspace Cloud environment.
Once the design is completed, the core infrastructure is built to provide an initial environment for production pilot user acceptance testing, rollout, and migration support. Once the pilot users have been on-boarded to the production environment, Entisys360 provides “day 2” operations services for managing the images, applications, and updates.
Q: What is the ideal customer profile for Entisys360 Workspace Cloud?
A: Entisys360 Workspace Cloud is ideal for mid-market and enterprise organizations with 500 or more end-users. The Entisys360 Workspace Cloud environment will be fully customized to meet our clients’ needs for any industry vertical specific requirements. Based on our experience in the mid-market and enterprise space, Entisys360 knows the complexity of client requirements. This offering has been purpose-built to address these challenges, as a flexible offering, that is not a one-size-fits-all solution for our clients.
Q: Is Entisys360 Workspace Cloud a new offering?
A: Over the years, Entisys360 has been tremendously successful with our Enterprise Managed Services offering, which is designed to provide day-to-day administrative management of traditional virtualization environments for mid-market and enterprise customers. There will be more information on these services to come, but in the meantime it is important to note that Entisys360 currently supports more than 30,000 end-users leveraging our Enterprise Managed Services offering.
In response to customer demand, we have built our Entisys360 Workspace Cloud to be a fully managed platform, hosted or on-premises, with a repeatable cloud reference architecture to ensure our clients’ success. Entisys360 Workspace Cloud is an evolution of various technologies and solutions that we have been successfully delivering in a more traditional manner for decades.
Q: How can an IT organization learn more about Entisys360 Workspace Cloud?
Entisys360 is committed to helping our clients maintain the maximum value of their virtualization and cloud investments, and to free up their team members to focus on more strategic business initiatives. Organizations looking to achieve these objectives can contact Entisys360 directly at Cloud@Entisys360.com, or they can also visit our website at www.e360.com for more information on our services.
