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The public cloud is growing ever more pervasive across industries and organizations of all sizes, thanks mainly to its dual advantages of flexibility and scalability. This makes it a natural choice for end-user computing (EUC) — an area that has become mission-critical since the pandemic prompted a global shift to remote and distributed workforces.
Research firm GartnerOpens a new window estimates that the public cloud segment is entering a new stage of explosive growth, with global end-user spending expected to reach $304.9 billion this year, up from $257.5 billion in 2020. But for all its remarkable growth, IT decision-makers are finding that the choice of cloud architecture is central to success, and the public cloud may not be the best option in every instance. This explains the growing interest in hybrid and multicloudOpens a new window approaches to EUC deployments. Multicloud is essentially when organizations use two or more public clouds for workloads.
In fact, the End User Computing: State of the Union 2021 surveyOpens a new window found that 45% of end-user computing solutions already use a hybrid environment — a combination of on-premise and public cloud. This is a 15% increase from the previous year, affirming that hybrid cloudOpens a new window is indeed seeing traction. Several factors make the business case for a hybrid cloud architecture stronger than ever, pegging it as a better — and sometimes only — choice.
- Data Security: Data, applications, and APIs are at risk wherever they are stored, and the public cloud comes with its own vulnerabilities. For example, non-secure APIs can open the door for hackers to steal sensitive data while breaches occurring due to cloud misconfigurations abound. A 2020 reportOpens a new window by DivvyCloud found a staggering 33 billion records exposed in 2018 and 2019 due to a lack of cloud security controls. Not just that, organizations that are heavily reliant on cloud environments could expose sensitive data to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that can disrupt business operations. In the most recent incident, an AWS customer suffered the largest DDoS attack in Q1 2020 with a volume of 2.3 Tbps. Hackers used a Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP) reflection and amplification technique to “cause three days of elevated threat during a single week in February 2020 before subsiding,†an AWS Shield Threat Landscape details. While the attack was detected and mitigated by AWS Shield, the scale of the attack reinforces the need for a comprehensive security strategy to avoid data loss.
- Optimization: An increasing number of organizations are working with multiple cloud providers to avoid vendor lock-in and drive cost governance and optimization. A Gartner surveyOpens a new window of public cloud users found 81% of respondents work with two or more cloud providers. Findings from Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud ReportOpens a new window echo a similar trend, with 92% of enterprises having a multicloud strategy while 82% have a hybrid cloud strategy. The shift to multicloud deployments would enable IT decision makers (ITDMs) to scale flexibly or consolidate according to business requirements, avoid wasting resources and ensure the protection and security of data.
- Data Privacy: In today’s ever-evolving business landscape, where new data privacy regulations are constantly being enforced, ITDMs are tasked with compliance and security. For this, they need visibility, flexibility, built-in security, and control over where their data is being stored. This is especially important to regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, education or government, where operational continuity and regulatory compliance are the most significant considerations when choosing a cloud approach. They need a solution that provides best-of-breed architecture that gives the organization absolute control over sensitive data and yet does not compromise on leveraging the benefits of public cloud architectures. Above all, in case of an outage or a cyberattack, all organizations need a quick and accurate understanding of the business impact, along with a clear path to disaster recovery and preparedness.
- Cost Efficiency: As public cloud adoption grows, organizations still struggle to quantify the cost savings resulting from increasing cloud spend. In fact, respondents surveyed by FlexeraOpens a new window noted organizations wasted 30% of cloud spend, while 61% of organizations plan to optimize existing use of the cloud to drive cost savings. They are discovering that not all of their workloads need to be on the public cloud. The hybrid architecture, coupled with cloud bursting capabilities, can help technology leaders avoid hidden or skyrocketing IT infrastructure costs by simplifying data portability across cloud environments and minimizing complexity. It gives them the freedom to meet growing business demands by moving appropriate workloads and applications to the public cloud while keeping sensitive data on-prem. Another notable trend in this context is that more and more on-premise VDI stacks will eventually go to the cloud. A essidsolutions 2020 State of Virtualization report found the “biggest opportunity for VDI providers won’t be on-premises,†with businesses shifting to modern cloud VDI solutions to cut down on operational complexity and expense.
Move EUC Workloads to Cloud On Your Terms
Evidently, the hybrid approach is helping many organizations enjoy the benefit of connecting their on-premise environment with the public cloud, enabling IT teams to move workloads seamlessly between two environments and get the best of both worlds to power their growing EUC needs.
EUC, a 25-year-old industry, has evolved dramatically and is today the linchpin for driving digital workspaces, achieving efficiency and performance with a powerful stack of solutions such as DaaS and VDI.
Desktop as a ServiceOpens a new window (DaaS) supplies desktops from anywhere in the public cloud rather than from an on-premises source. The advantage to an organization is the pay-as-you-go model that is also scalable – companies only pay for as many or as few users at any time.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Opens a new window (VDI) is another EUC solution that enabled the fast-paced shift to remote work during the pandemic-ravaged 2020. This virtualization separates the end user’s desktop environment and applications from whatever device they are using. VDI is inherently secure since any data the employee uses is stored in the data center in a private cloudOpens a new window , not on the employee’s device. In addition, the IT team can easily upgrade and patch the virtual desktops, reducing the risk of new vulnerabilities.
Both techniques form part of the EUC stack and provide a better computing experience for the user.
With hybrid, distributed, and remote work models becoming a permanent change for industries globally, the timing for exploring and adopting hybrid and multicloud EUC solutions couldn’t be more perfect. The EUC- as-a-service model enables just that— helping ITDMs eliminate performance bottlenecks, retain control of data security and privacy, optimize cost efficiencies, and reduce the burden on already-stretched IT teams to provision, manage and upgrade infrastructure.
Below are three compelling reasons for adopting hybrid and multicloud EUC solutions:
- Workload portability
The flexibility to easily move data and workloads between private to public clouds to provide the best service for end-users, meet compliance requirements and ensure enhanced security are compelling factors for adopting a hybrid cloud model in today’s complex computing environment. This allows IT teams to take a more nuanced approach, port application workloads to cloud at their pace, and utilize the best aspects of each public cloud provider. Most importantly, it empowers IT to bring cloud scaling and agility to the enterprise application landscape. - Moving the control plane to the cloud
For network traffic, the control plane — administrative consoles and interfaces to manage services and resources would include routing, load balancing, and security. So far, it was only possible to get a single view of on-premise computing and data or a single view of cloud computing and data usage separately. Moving the control plane to the cloud — part of the wider movement towards Software as a Service (SaaS) — allows a single view of precisely what’s going on with all the computing assets at the same time because public cloud management solutions can be extended to show local environments. - Cloud for disaster recovery (DR)
The recovery process after any failure or disaster in a VDI environment can result in downtime when services are not available to users. Traditionally, backups would be taken and stored on tape, but since they would always be taken at least a day (or longer) before the outage, the restored data would never be completely up to date. In a hybrid environment, copies of business-critical data can be made (replication) and stored in the cloud at the frequency decided by IT. If copies are taken more frequently, the restored data will be more up to date, making the disaster recovery process faster.
The other key benefit in a hybrid environment is that a surge for a particular application will not place a huge load on an on-premise server, which might otherwise cause the server to slow down or even crash, resulting in downtime and severely impacting business continuity.
Hybrid Cloud Matters Now More Than Ever
Without a doubt, the benefits of hybrid cloud are compelling for businesses of all sizes. Besides the enhanced user experience, which is at the core of EUC, the hybrid and multicloud approach removes legacy infrastructure bottlenecks and simplifies IT operations by centralizing management. IT admins can control and manage security measures such as encryption, end-point security and access control more easily. Plus, the flexibility and agility to move some workloads to the public cloud mean organizations no longer need to purchase, install, and manage on-premise infrastructure if usage of particular applications spikes without notice.
One company that ticks all the boxes when it comes to setting up a high-performance hybrid environment for EUC workloads is NutanixOpens a new window . Built on industry leading hyperconverged infrastructure Opens a new window (HCI), Nutanix provides the fastest deployment times, enabling IT to burst up to 2,000 Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix ClustersOpens a new window from private cloud to public cloud in under two hoursOpens a new window . For organizations with highly distributed workforces and a growing number of remote staff, Nutanix’s VDI solutions from Citrix and VMware and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) with Nutanix FrameOpens a new window help overcome the cost and complexity of traditional VDI solutions. Its hybrid EUC strategy helps IT teams in organizations of any size, anywhere globally, to streamline and simplify their operations and standardize environments at scale.
From the ease of deployment to on-demand elasticity, the Nutanix EUC solution lets IT managers successfully support a large number of users for the long term and provide consistent access to apps and data across locations. A key advantage is the robust automated disaster recoveryOpens a new window (DR) capabilities allowing for replication and file-level recovery, which reduces BC/DR needs by over 75% compared to legacy 3-tier infrastructure. Organizations can improve their security posture, prevent data loss, and maintain cost efficiencies across the board.
The post-pandemic environment is driving a new set of challenges and complexities for IT leaders. As organizations deal with highly distributed workforces, they need secure, flexible solutions with a pay-as-you-go model to address end-user needs. Aside from the much-needed scalability, flexibility and cost-efficiency, disaster recovery and business continuity are the strongest arguments for using the hybrid and multicloud EUC in your organization.
If you’re ready to learn more, visit Nutanix.comOpens a new window .