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Organizations increasingly seek to improve IT efficiency and business agility by leveraging the public cloud to augment on-premises IT environments. End-user computing (EUC) workloads are a perfect fit for hybrid and multicloud deployments, enabling IT teams to simply and seamlessly scale their needs with a consistent environment across all locations.

A single control plane with a consistent unified management layer across all environments increases management efficiencies, security and resilience. Built-in zero-trust policies are also critical to prevent, detect and mitigate security threats.

EUC Broker in the Public Cloud

Customer Example

Penn National Insurance required a solution to reduce the potential loss in productivity, revenue and reputation should an IT disaster ever occur. The company also wanted to improve BCDR recovery times and IT efficiency while reducing the overall solution cost. Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS with Citrix for VDI desktops enables Penn National Insurance to get up and running very quickly should an IT failover event occur.

Key Benefits and Use Cases for EUC in Hybrid Multiclouds

Centralized EUC and Cloud Management

Leverage secure and consistent hybrid and multicloud operations across all on-premises and public cloud deployments with a unified management plane that simplifies operational complexity.

Typically, one of the first considerations for hybrid and multicloud EUC implementations is the EUC broker. It is important to understand how this is different from traditional on-premises management, which is based on customer-installed, maintained, patched, and upgraded software. Upgrades are often cumbersome with multiple dependencies leading to unnecessary complexity and operations pain.

With a cloud hosted EUC broker, management is offloaded as a service, typically hosted by Citrix with Citrix Cloud. By delivering the broker as a service, the control plane no longer needs to be installed or maintained and IT can simply operate it. In this scenario, the vendor is responsible for all aspects of keeping it up and running and patched with the latest hotfixes, resulting in an evergreen solution that benefits the customer with continuous and automatic upgrades.

Benefits of centralized cloud management with Nutanix EUC on hybrid multicloud:

  • Expand to the public cloud and pay only for what you use or consume.
  • Burst or expand your EUC and VDI workloads to the cloud.
  • Move / copy user data / profiles to the cloud 
  • The EUC broker – such as Citrix or VMWare – is still owned by the customer. 

Seamless Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery(BCDR)

Historically, organizations relied on backups or secondary sites to duplicate infrastructure for their disaster recovery (DR) strategy. It’s important to match any BCDR solution SLAs with the required Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for the business. However, maintaining secondary sites for VDI disaster recovery purposes can be costly, time consuming and unnecessarily duplicitous.

What if VDI workloads could be seamlessly moved to the public cloud at the time of a disaster? This can be accomplished with NC2 for AWS or Azure in a few easy steps:

  1. Verify that the Citrix EUC solution is functioning correctly on-premises.

  2. Select the preferred public cloud provider, such as AWS or Azure.

  3. Extend the Nutanix Cloud Platform to that public cloud with NC2.

  4. Extend Citrix services to that public cloud on NC2.

  5. Migrate or clone the end users to the cloud.

  6. During a disaster recovery event, NC2 in the public cloud will function as a replacement to ensure business continuity.

  7. After the disaster is resolved, fall back to the original on-premises environment. 

In a matter of minutes you have recovered seamlessly from a disaster that otherwise would have negatively impacted business operations for a period of days or even weeks. 

EUC Workload Consistency Across Clouds

Not all applications make sense on-premises and not all workloads make sense in the public cloud. What if they could be intelligently placed where needed or moved with the same consistent look and feel as your needs change? This is another use case for hybrid multicloud in EUC workload portability.

This benefit opens many use cases such as disaster recovery, rapid growth, temp and seasonal workloads, dynamic test/dev environments, or what is commonly referred to as “swing migrations and upgrades' '. This results in moving components to a different location, upgrading the core, then moving the function back.

Recently, this swing migration approach was successfully used by a Nutanix customer in the UK, which was undergoing datacenter consolidation and increasing the use of the public cloud. The customer was able to move workloads between a datacenter and the public cloud without application refactoring or retooling workloads. 

The key to this freedom is to place your workloads where it makes the most sense and to not allow yourself to be constrained by a single environment and the complexities of hybrid multicloud management, processes and/or procedures.

Conclusion

Nutanix Cloud Platform is a powerful infrastructure solution that  seamlessly extends on-premises environments into the public cloud, enhancing agility, scalability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. With a unified control plane, it ensures consistent management, security and resiliency for evolving end-user computing workloads.

To experience it for yourself take a test drive at https://www.nutanix.com/one-platform.launchtestdrive.json?type=citrix&lpurl=one-platform-citrix

Learn more at www.nutanix.com.