With so many organizations looking to find ways to embrace the public cloud without compromising the security of their data and applications, a hybrid cloud strategy is rapidly becoming the preferred method of efficiently delivering IT services.

This guide aims to provide you with an understanding of the driving factors behind why the cloud is being adopted en-masse, as well as advice on how to begin building your own cloud strategy.

Topics discussed include:
•    Why Cloud?
•    Getting There Safely
•    IT Resilience in the Hybrid Cloud
•    The Power of Microsoft Azure and Zerto

You’ll find out how, by embracing the cloud, organizations can achieve true IT Resilience – the ability to withstand any disruption, confidently embrace change and focus on business.

Learn the benefits and limitations of  the 3 generations of IT infrastructure  – siloed, converged and hyperconverged – and discover how the 4th generation of IT infrastructure  – composable –  can transform your business. 

The composable infrastructure enables you to:

• Tightly integrate server, storage, networking, virtualization, VM/container centric management and an application marketplace to create a high-speed infrastructure platform that includes everything needed to run applications out of the box – a single silo platform
• Easily and independently scale network, storage, and compute resources on-demand, making it possible to run a wide diversity of workloads

Manage your infrastructure from anywhere through a single SaaS management portal

Businesses today aspire to achieve a software-defined datacenter (SDDC) to enhance business agility and reduce operational complexity. However, the SDDC solutions available today forgot about the most complex part of your infrastructure—the network.

Network virtualization is critical to simplify application scaling and improve application performance without lengthy maintenance windows and potential security risks.
 
In this whitepaper you will be introduced to Cloudistics Ignite’s Adaptive Overlay Network (AON) technology that provides the following benefits:
◦    Simplifies and automates network provisioning, avoiding manual errors common when dealing with physical networks, VLANs, etc.

• Enables you to scale your business to multi-site locations without unnecessary costly hardware purchases and lengthy maintenance windows

• Enables you to fine-tune your application’s performance and security through dedicated virtual networks that can be deployed in minutes

Natively built-into the Ignite platform, lowering costs by eliminating the need for 3rd party software and hardware

• Deliver 5x faster applications than traditional hyperconverged solutions
• Scale independent network, storage and compute resources for 4x lower costs
• Eliminate expensive hypervisor costs with our KVM-based hypervisor built-in

Virtualizing Windows applications and desktops in the data center or cloud has compelling security, mobility and management benefits, but delivering real-time voice and video in a virtual environment is a challenge. A poorly optimized implementation can increase costs and compromise user experience. Server scalability and bandwidth efficiency may be less than optimal, and audio-video quality may be degraded.

Enabling voice and video with a bundled solution in an existing Citrix environment delivers clearer and crisper voice and video than legacy phone systems. This solution guide describes how Sennheiser headsets combine with Citrix infrastructure and IGEL endpoints to provide a better, more secure user experience. It also describes how to deploy the bundled Citrix-Sennheiser-IGEL solution.

The technology of cloud computing has caught up with virtual desktop infrastructures. Tapping into the agility and flexibility of cloud-hosted infrastructures, Citrix Cloud enables organizations to simplify digital workspace delivery. With many of the critical components of the Citrix delivery infrastructure hosted in the cloud and managed by Citrix, organizations can speed up deployment, lower hardware footprint, increase ROI, simplify IT operations. Despite the many benefits of Citrix Cloud, the performance management challenges still persist, just as they do in traditional on-premises Citrix deployments.

Read this eG Innovations white paper, and understand:

• The two popular Citrix Cloud deployment options
• Performance monitoring challenges in Citrix Cloud infrastructures
• Stakeholders involved and their respective domains of responsibility
• The various monitoring tools and options available
• Best practices to set up performance monitoring

Managing Windows user profiles can be a complex and challenging process. Better profile management is usually sought by organizations looking to reduce Windows login times, accommodate applications that do not adhere to best practice application data storage, and to give users the flexibility to login to any Windows Operating System (OS) and have their profile follow them. Note that additional profile challenges and solutions are covered in a related ProfileUnity whitepaper entitled “User Profile and Environment Management with ProfileUnity.” To efficiently manage the complex challenges of today’s diverse Windows profile environments, Liquidware ProfileUnity exclusively features two user profile technologies that can be used together or separately depending on the use case.

These include:

1. ProfileDisk, a virtual disk based profile that delivers the entire profile as a layer from an attached user VHD or VMDK, and

2. Profile Portability, a file and registry based profile solution that restores files at login, post login, or based on environment triggers.

Digital transformation projects have accelerated the adoption of new technologies and a multitude of cloud services. Infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals face exacerbated challenges associated with managing an increasingly diverse environment.

In response, vendors have saturated the market with confusing hybrid products and solutions that vary vastly in capabilities.
This report provides clarity about and categorization of hybrid architectures to help I&O professionals evolve operational models and select services based on their unique requirements.

Key Takeaways

More Options Mandate New Technology Roles, Skills, And Responsibilities
Hybrid injects more technologies into an already complex mix of choices. Seek to simplify with automation, supply chain management, and software coding representing some key new demands. Adapt your organization to meet these demands; old-school IT methods crumble in the new hybrid systems.

Consider Processes, Skills, And Applications As Hybrid Models Move Beyond Just Cloud
Forrester classifies four hybrid architecture models. Cloud may seem obvious, but operations, infrastructure, and applications may not. They're just as important — and maybe even more so in your environment.

Formulate A DevOps Philosophy To Permeate Every Corner Of Your Business
Development and operations (DevOps) and Agile methodologies and philosophies are popular because they encourage speed over perfection. Now pervasive in application development and delivery, these principles offer value everywhere — especially in hybrid architectures.

Many large enterprises are moving important applications from traditional physical servers to virtualized environments, such as VMware vSphere in order to take advantage of key benefits such as configuration flexibility, data and application mobility, and efficient use of IT resources.

Realizing these benefits with business critical applications, such as SQL Server or SAP can pose several challenges. Because these applications need high availability and disaster recovery protection, the move to a virtual environment can mean adding cost and complexity and limiting the use of important VMware features. This paper explains these challenges and highlights six key facts you should know about HA protection in VMware vSphere environments that can save you money.