The Cloud Workspace concept has been receiving quite a bit of attention lately at tradeshows, among industry publications, and within peer groups. In this blog post, I’ll discuss how a Cloud Workspace strategy can have operational benefits for service providers. Before we delve into this, however, let me briefly review what a Cloud Workspace is.
I define the Cloud Workspace as a cloud hosted environment built by a service provider to deliver a client’s applications, data and security policies. The client can connect to the cloud environment from any device anywhere they have an internet connection, and access their applications and data via a secure cloud desktop or application streaming technologies like RemoteApp.
What Elements Does a Service Provider Need to Have in Place to Deliver a Cloud Workspace
In order to deliver a Workspace solution economically and at scale, a service provider should employ automation tools to spin up servers and users with associated group policies and active directory assignments. Further, service providers should create or choose a third-party control panel that orchestrates actions between the client’s end user computing environment and the underlying cloud infrastructure that supports it. The control panel should also be able to map out application workflows and other support tasks involving human to human interaction. Overall, service providers need to be able to satisfy client needs while retaining centralized control over the entire environment.
How Can Service Providers Achieve Operational Advantages with Cloud Workspaces
By deploying a Cloud Workspace solution, service providers can offer standardized modules to multiple customers while reducing the time spent customizing environments. In contrast, service providers that try to manage an on-premises data center encounter highly specialized configurations, unique hardware, and complex and difficult to manage security and access control policies. In addition, and over the years, on-premises deployments that work based upon “tribal knowledge”, inevitably end up riddled with zombie users or groups, inherited network and security vulnerabilities and overall reliability and availability issues.
Service providers, on the other hand, can limit the number of variables and complexities in each environment with a standards-based Cloud Workspace offering powered by a cloud orchestration and automation tool like Cielo, by itopia. With Cloud Workspace, the variables that change from customer to customer are reduced to the number of users, applications, devices and amount of data.
Intuitive and easy to use tools like Cielo also make it simpler for service providers to deliver a Cloud Workspace solution by automating otherwise complex technical tasks like managing: group policies, firewalls, virtual networks, the underlying hypervisor, Active Directory integration, storage networks, and so on. Through complex APIs and unique client identifiers, Cielo orchestrates communications with critical backend systems in the cloud automatically. Basically, you won’t need to build your business around a small (and expensive) army of VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, or Cisco-certified engineers or negotiate large commitments with software companies and IaaS providers to deliver Cloud Workspace environments.
Finally, service providers can increase profitability and decrease customer support by automating tedious and time-consuming tasks such as monitoring, server maintenance, virus remediation, updates and patches. At itopia, we staff level-three engineers and enlist the expertise of world-class IaaS providers to handle all of the heavy lifting when it comes to back-end systems, networking and application installations. On average, our partners receive about .25 calls per user per month with an average talk time of twenty minutes. These calls are all tier 1 trouble-ticket items and are most often resolved by a helpdesk individual without requiring escalation.
There’s no question that managed service providers can not only add a whole new line of recurring revenue to their businesses with a Cloud Workspace solution, but also reduce operational costs. Without stepping foot into a messy on-premises data center in which it could take weeks, or even months, to set up an end user computing environment, service providers can use automation and orchestration tools like Cielo, to get their customers up and running in a matter of hours, as well provide inexpensive and ongoing management.
The post Workspace as a Service Benefits Service Providers Too appeared first on Itopia.
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