The Hybrid Delivery Environment
The hybrid delivery environment is a combination of traditional, private, and public cloud environments. With today’s diverse business landscape, devices and applications are doing double duty—working within the corporate network as well as outside it. It’s not just a one-to-one relationship anymore. Data is not just being tied to a corporate laptop or desktop; data is being used, shared, and stored locally. End-users are keeping files outside the corporate network on file sharing solutions—without any common IT policy tying together their personal computers, tablets, and smartphones.
Presently, the transition to IT service-based delivery models for application and desktop delivery has been largely tactical. So while businesses are still focusing on high-level goals like improving flexibility and agility while managing costs, many organizations have begun deploying assorted delivery models to achieve smaller tactical objectives.
For example, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has experienced some success when deployed to end-users who have predictable roles and responsibilities, but this technology has not been able to break through boundaries to demonstrate the value to a mobile worker. The same holds true for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that are independently used, but lack centralized control. But employing a strategy to satisfy immediate needs with temporary solutions is ultimately myopic. Why? Because these solutions fail to aggregate across endpoints and delivery models, complicating IT management and impeding end-user access. In essence, these solutions are unable to address the long-term goal of IT—securing, managing, and improving business processes.
To be able to secure, manage, and improve business processes, it’s essential for organizations to put into place a federated workplace delivery platform—one that centralizes IT management, provisioning, and security on an intelligent infrastructure, and provides end-users with a common, easily accessible interface. Simply put, IT must find a way to aggregate different applications, desktop, and data delivery and consumption models in a hybrid delivery environment, and maintain control over them while providing easy access for end-users.
The “Dissection” of the End-user Work Environment
Traditionally, organizations have delivered end-user desktops as a single, bundled unit. User settings, applications, operating systems, and data were coupled to a traditional desktop or laptop, and delivered as a packaged unit (see Figure 3, Traditional Method). This method doesn’t take into account the resources an end-user requires at any given time, so everything associated with that particular end-user is delivered in total, expending unnecessary time and resources.
With the Contemporary Method, virtualization has thrown a wrench into the works of convention by enabling the parsing and encapsulation of all layers. Now organizations are able to deliver each layer independently of the other (see Figure 3). Orchestration and management software works dynamically to assemble the various components needed at run-time. By delivering each level independently of one another, IT is better able to streamline desktop and application delivery, and can cater to specific networks and device types.
And while traditional desktops and virtualization at multiple layers are both valid means of delivering end-user work environments, IT can further improve on workplace delivery models.