What are the critical components needed for EUC solutions at every scale?

Dane spoke about his early days in consulting working for a systems integrator / consulting firm and how Dane would spend a lot of time thinking about all of the various different solutions that his firm offered customers and trying to think of a way to distill all of it down into simple terms that the customers could understand which solutions fit where and help the customers to better understand why they needed certain solutions from the consulting firm.  During the webinar, Dane mentioned the excellent diagram created by Ruben Spruijt called the EUC Hexagrid.  If you’re not familiar with the EUC Hexagrid you can find a whitepaper that contains it located here. Essentially, the EUC Hexagrid is a reference diagram that you can use to understand all of the technologies that are frequently used with an EUC technology deployment. The Hexagrid does not necessarily imply that every technology in the diagram will be used by every single colleague within an organization, however you will find that it does cover all of the technologies that are directly associated with a typical EUC deployment (or technologies that are directly adjacent to the main EUC solution). A really important takeaway from the discussion with Dane is that companies are really starting to pay attention to the importance of measuring user experience and working to improve the user experience scores for their existing users to ensure they’re delivering a great user experience. Sonet.io knows that it’s important to provide a great user experience as we provide a great deal of analytics about the usage of applications within your organization along with tracking any policy violations that may occur during the usage of those applications and you can optionally record every user session to review the user experience received by the user to use it to audit the policy violations that have occurred.

‍

How are applications and data reshaping the EUC landscape?

Dane shared his views that data is the most important aspect of what we do in End User Computing. Securing and controlling access to data is critical.  Data is the crown jewels of an organization and it’s what provides companies with their competitive differentiation. Protecting the data is the most important aspect of end user computing solutions.  Dane also shared that over the last decade there has been a massive increase in the use of Web and SaaS applications and often employees need to be able to export data from their web applications, use that data in a thick client application and then re-upload to re-import that data to the original app or new apps.  But this externalization of data presents risks to the organization. At Sonet.io, data protection is built into our solution. Any web or SaaS applications that end users need to interact with we can prevent them from downloading or exporting data from the web applications through a policy control and this is even true if the Web/SaaS app permits data to be exported.  We can also control data access via copy/paste functions and have a deep content inspection capability to prevent associates from copying confidential data (or many other types of content inspection rules).  But what about the situation that Dane presented where an associate needs to export data and do further analysis in something like Excel. At Sonet.io we can handle this requirement out of the  box. You can permit associates to download data, but rather than allowing them to save it onto their endpoint device, you can allow them to download it into a secure content storage repository in the cloud. That content repository can then be accessed by any thick client applications (like Excel) and associates can manipulate that data all within the secure cloud storage location. When the associate is finished, they can save the Excel file and re-upload the contents from the secure cloud storage location to the web/SaaS backend and the data never hits the associated endpoint device.

‍

The transformative impact of cloud adoption / Desktop-as-a-Service

There’s no doubt that cloud computing has dramatically changed the landscape of data center computing and by extension this has also changed how people think about end user computing solutions as well. Why should an organization spend months to years constructing a data center expansion and build out to deploy a new set of virtual desktops or published applications if they can instead leverage the power of cloud computing and rapidly deploy their solution in a matter of hours to days instead of months? Dane spoke a lot about his experiences with Desktop-as-a-Service and how many customers are moving away from thinking of this as a managed service solution and instead are leveraging platform thinking. In other words, customers are using the DaaS platforms as places to run their end user compute workloads, but they’re still doing a lot of the management of said solutions themselves. This allows them to be nimble and leverage the best fit desktop solution to their use case and remain flexible if they need to choose a particular cloud environment for specific benefits. Treating DaaS as a platform provides them the flexibility to move faster.  Still for some customers, managing a complex deployment does come with a certain amount of automation and orchestration that may fall in the customers responsibility. At Sonet.io, we deliver access to all types of applications & virtual desktops like a true SaaS service. We leverage multiple cloud providers to deliver the best experience to the end-users. We take away the complexity of needing to build your own automation,  orchestration and maintaining the VMs. Simply use your apps as you should like any other SaaS offering.

‍

Watch the webinar here:

‍

‍