“We simply could not put the complete set of security controls in place with the way it was architected,” Wyatt told The Forecast. “Since then, from an on-prem, hybrid infrastructure perspective, we have settled on Nutanix, at the core.”
“Single Pane of Glass” Management
A cloud management platform gives admins the advantage of a unified console and GUI that controls services and resources across the on-prem and cloud environments. They get a single view of all resources, assets and services and can manage security, data usage, storage, server operations, routing and so on centrally.
Availability & Disaster Recovery
VDI and DaaS deployments typically have inherent load balancing and redundancy features. A centrally managed hybrid architecture enables IT admins to control the replication frequency of business-critical data. In the event of a disaster, the data restored to the VDI is almost always up-to-date (because of near-real-time backups and replication) unlike in a legacy environment.
Data Privacy and Control
Perhaps the biggest consideration while planning and deploying an EUC system in today’s environment is data privacy and regulatory compliance. There is always a trade-off between visibility, flexibility, security and control of data.
In highly-regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, legal, government and telecom, a hybrid architecture provides granular control over end users’ desktops, eliminating the possibility of sensitive data being stored on private machines.
The hybrid cloud enables architects to account for data storage and transfer regulations across diverse geographic regions that fall under different national laws.
“For sure, there are customers who cannot use certain cloud services, from a regulation perspective, but that group is shrinking,” said Spruijt. “Even in countries like Germany where, two or three years ago, the cloud was a ‘no-go,’ things are slowly changing.”
Workload Portability
Because of the advantages in cloud performance, application resiliency, availability and scalability, perhaps the biggest advantage that a hybrid infrastructure offers EUC is workload portability – it enables the organization to provide simplified and flexible UX to employees, vendors and customers while meeting compliance and security requirements.