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Transform your digital workplace with the right hybrid cloud platforms

With so many platforms available for your hybrid workplace, how do you choose between them? Join us for a free webinar on April 22, 9:00 PDT, as we explore the top strategies for capabilities such as communication and collaboration, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and employee productivity.

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 In the space of just a few years, hybrid cloud has become the dominant model for IT operations. Itโ€™s at the core of a new kind of digital workplace, one that flows freely across physical locations, enabling users to be at their most productive wherever they happen to be โ€“ a truly hybrid workplace.

With so many hybrid cloud platforms available, how do you choose between them? In an upcoming webinar How the Right Hybrid Cloud Platform Can Transform Your Workplace, HPE experts including myself will tackle that question. Join us on April 22, 9:00 PDT, as we explore the top strategies for capabilities such as communication and collaboration, virtualization desktop infrastructure (VDI) and employee productivity.

As one of the presenters, I was asked by Cloud Experience Everywhere blog editor John Cummings to provide a preview of the webinar. Hereโ€™s part of our conversation:

John Cummings:  As companies moved towards a hybrid workplace at the height of the pandemic, what were the go-to solutions? Were there any surprise successes or unsung heroes?

Mark Wayt: The most public one, of course, was Zoom, especially because it took off for both corporate environments and consumers. From a purely enterprise point of view, Microsoft Teams was one of the big winners. We are aware of some customers who deployed Microsoft Office 365 only to take advantage of the Teams element, without moving their email or documents; some of them are now are engaging HPE to help them analyze security and do the main planning and migration work.

Alongside that was the mobilization of applications using VDI. Suddenly, companies realized they needed to mobilize critically secure apps without risking security (VPN was a massive security risk), and HPE VDI was ideal for that. With platforms such as HPE Greenlake VDI, the barrier to entry was lower. And for a true โ€˜zero trustโ€™ model (where you donโ€™t trust the endpoint at all โ€“ so you could safely allow a banking application access from an employeeโ€™s home laptop, for example) there wasnโ€™t anything that would compete.

John: Are there any selection criteria for hybrid cloud platforms that businesses overlooked? Any pitfalls they should be aware of?

Mark: The crisis did reveal the capacity limitations of public cloud. As we all know, โ€œthere is no cloud โ€“ itโ€™s just somebody elseโ€™s computer.โ€ We know of a few companies that ran cloud VDI in one of the main cloud vendors and had issues with actually provisioning their services and turning their servers on due to capacity issues. All cloud vendors do โ€˜thin provisioningโ€™ from a storage and a compute perspective, which means you may have bought an โ€˜allocationโ€™ of processing, memory and storage, but they are betting on you not using that whole capacity 100% of the time. They effectively over-allocate the available capacity. If we all turn up and utilize 100% of the capacity we have purchased, someone will lose out.

Some companies also found their networking infrastructure sorely lacking. Again โ€“ you provision a network with the gamble that youโ€™ll have a certain percentage of people in the office, and a percentage of people at home. Suddenly when you send all your staff home, while you may have the licenses on your VPN endpoints, you may not have the bandwidth or capacity for all the users simultaneously.

John: As we start to emerge from the pandemic, how are companiesโ€™ technology choices for the hybrid workplace evolving?

Mark: Going forward, the challenge now is: How do you run and operate a mostly remote workforce? No longer can people walk into IT and swap their laptop if itโ€™s broken. IT needs to be smart and think of the processes theyโ€™re using to enable remote work effectively, with platforms like Microsoft 365 for storing your data and profiles, and tools such as VMwareโ€™s Workspace ONE to enable you to manage devices.

Mobile device management (MDM) isnโ€™t just about mobile phones and tablets anymore; the Windows, Mac and Chromebook laptops now also fit into that category. Managing the lifecycle of those devices is achievable โ€“ by being truly device-agnostic, delivering apps via VDI, even moving away from a corporate delivered device to a CYOD (choose your own device) or BYOD (bring your own device) model. The platform should be able to help you make constructive and secure decisions about how services are provisioned, based on the end user and the security controls needed.

And what about physical locations? People do want to return to an office, but they want it to be smart. They want offices that are more like collaboration hubs, with access to smart meeting rooms. From a corporate perspective, whatโ€™s needed is buildings that can cope with the ebb and flow of user requirements. This is where HPEโ€™s IoT and hybrid workplace capabilities fit in. For example, making sure that air conditioning is off in a room, if there are no meetings scheduled that week, can help you save money and reduce your environmental footprint. We can also help you to โ€˜right-sizeโ€™ a building by enabling an accurate understanding of capacity needs.

I hope you can join us for the webinar to learn more about hybrid cloud choices for the digital workplace. Register today for How the Right Hybrid Cloud Platform Can Transform Your Workplace.

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Mark Wayt
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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About the Author

Mark_Wayt

Mark is a Worldwide Client Platforms Architect, owning part of the portfolio and covering all elements of Digital Workplace (VDI, Microsoft 365 & Windows 10) in the Intelligent Edge and IoT Practice Area in HPE Pointnext.