The Software Defined Enterprise – Part 1: The Digital Workspace

The Software Defined Enterprise is becoming reality in a world that is changing around us in an ever increasing pace.  Organizations which do not organize their business processes to absorb and adopt change will remain behind. Functionality is increasingly being delivered through software, where the dependency with hardware is rapidly fading. Reason for this is that software is much easier to alter, highly flexible and agile to put in place. Organizations are looking at deploying software so they can add revenue streams through software by developing (new) markets and exploring opportunities like for instance the Internet of Things. Enterprises going Software Defined do that to reduce costs but also enables new possible revenue streams and business models.

The way people work, live, learn, play and work together has changed. Access to communication, information and applications have become indispensable and nourish the speed of economic and technical developments. In this digital era, where everything is going digital, working with all kinds of different applications is a real challenge for both Users as IT.

Users want simplicity, easy access and choice versus where IT has the mission to make sure that the resources are available, secure, affordable and predictable.

So how does one lead into another and how can you make sure users will get easy access to Any application on Any device in a Secure manor? VMware has announced yesterday that they have made the next step in making sure that users can get simple and secure access to a Digital Workspace with the release of VMware Workspace ONE and VMware Horizon 7.

The rapid adoption of new modern applications (SaaS apps, mobile apps) coupled with the sprawl of powerful yet affordable mobile devices has introduced new challenges in the work environment. In order to be productive whenever and wherever, employees have
gone around traditional rigid policies. Organizations are facing a critical inflection point to either ignore these trends at the peril of unintended security breaches or to embrace a new way of working leveraging a new management framework. VMware Workspace ONE is the simple and secure enterprise platform that delivers and manages any app on any smartphone, tablet, or laptop. It has consumer grade self-service, single-sign on access to cloud, mobile, and Windows applications and includes great integrated email, calendar, file and social collaboration tools that engage employees. Meanwhile, employees are put in the driver’s seat to choose their own devices and the weight of management necessary to drive the adoption of BYOD programs including a combination of VMware Identity Manager and AirWatch Enterprise Mobility Management to enforce fine-grained, risk-based conditional access policies. Finally, Workspace ONE perfectly automates traditional onboarding, laptop and mobile device configuration, and delivers real-time application lifecycle management that bridges between legacy enterprise client-server apps to the mobile-cloud era.

VMware Workspace ONE is the simple and secure enterprise platform that delivers and manages any application on any devices, like a smartphone, tablet or laptop. They have integrated identity management, real-time application delivery, and enterprise mobility management, Workspace ONE engages digital employees, reduces the threat of data leakage, and modernizes traditional IT operations for the Mobile Cloud Era.

VMware announced Workspace ONE as, the simple and secure enterprise platform that delivers and manages any app on any device by integrating identity, application, and enterprise Picture1mobility management. The introduction of Workspace ONE is the result of over two years of planning and well over a billion dollars in investment both organically and inorganically. This investment includes the market-leading enterprise mobility management (EMM) from VMware AirWatch, the recently introduced VMware Identity Manager and the new cloud management service in VMware Horizon Air. While these products have been and will continue to be developed and sold individually, there has been an even greater ongoing effort to both integrate common services and innovate by creating net-new functionality, packaging and purchasing flexibility. Wanna know more about this VMware announcement please read this interesting blog on the VMware EUC blog named Embracing Consumerization for the Digital Workspace: VMware Introduces Workspace ONE by Kevin Strohmeyer, senior director, product marketing, End-User Computing, VMware.

VMware introduced Workspace Suite in 2014, where it is a combination of the AirWatch and Horizon product portfolios that allowed IT organizations to begin building digital workspaces of their own. Workspace ONE moves from a portfolio of products to a jointly engineered platform, where design teams and engineers defined use cases for digital workspaces and built new innovations to speed the deployment and adoption of digital workspaces. The all-new Workspace ONE is built as a cloud-first service, where continuous development is employed to bring new innovations to the cloud-based service on a weekly and monthly basis. It also supports on-premises deployments, with releases built 2-3 times a year from the same code base.

A few highlights are:

• A true BYO-anything (Bring-Your-Own-Anything) solution that gives employees flexibility and device choice while securing corporate data
• A unified enterprise app store with seamless single sign-on across Windows apps, SaaS/Web apps, and native mobile apps
• Comprehensive Windows 10 management and deployment in the enterprise including real time Windows apps delivery
• Accelerate Office 365 deployments by federating between existing on-premises Active Directory and Microsoft Azure Active Directory

All Workspace ONE editions are licensed on a per user basis and available as an annual cloud subscription or a perpetual on-premise license.

Horizon 7 delivers published applications and desktops on a single integrated VDI platform. In this new version there are four key innovations First-toMarket, namely Just-in-Time Delivery, Application Lifecycle Management, Blast Extreme Experience and Smart Policies.  Just in Time Delivery with Instant Clone Technology is turning the traditional VDI provisioning model on its head. Now, a booted-up parent VM can be “hot-cloned” to produce derivative desktop VM’s rapidly, leveraging the same disk and memory of the parent, with the clone starting in an already “booted-up” state. This process bypasses the cycle time incurred with traditional cloning where several power cycle and reconfiguration calls are usually made. When combined with VMware App Volumes and User Environment Manager, administrators can use Instant Clone Technology to rapidly spin up desktops for users that retain user customization and persona from session to session, even though the desktop itself is destroyed when the user logs out. Virtual desktops benefit from the latest O/S and application patches automatically applied between user logins, without any disruptive recompose. This capability is delivering customers the VDI nirvana of fully customized and personalized desktops, built on the economics and security of stateless, non-persistent desktops.

• Just-in-Time Delivery with Instant Clone Technology – Instant Clone technology coupled with App Volumes 3.0 dramatically reduces infrastructure requirements while enhancing security. Now you can deliver brand new personalized desktop and application services instantly to end users every time they log in.
• Applications with Modernized Lifecycle Management – Easily support end users with access to virtual desktops and published applications—including RDS hosted applications and Citrix XenApp. Transform application management from a slow, cumbersome process into a highly scalable, nimble delivery mechanism that provides faster application delivery and management while reducing IT costs dramatically.
• Transformational User Experience with Blast Extreme – A new protocol built for the mobile cloud that ensures end users can enjoy a better desktop experience across any network or location and on more devices than ever before.

• Smart Policies with Streamlined Access – Improve end user satisfaction by simplifying authentication across all desktop and application services while improving security with smarter, contextual, role-based policies that tie to the user, device or location.