Cloud Server and Collaborative Tools

[dmsims]

With any non local solution:

Make sure your connection is capable and think about the ramifications to your business if it disappears and plan accordingly

and yes it can take many days to get a leased line fixed!

[Doodlebug87]

Throwing a couple of suggestions out there - box have signed a strategic partnership with IBM which is penned for around a decade I think. Box as a product is very good and is one of the few which has deep enough security features to be viable for industries such as legal, gov or finance. What box does not have is a very mature sales mechanism or history / pedigree, which is where IBM come in. They are co developing some great features and bring their enterprise experience to the table, along with providing a UK datacenter to host box later this year. If interested give me a shout and I can go through the solution with you and understand what you are actually trying to achieve to advise what options you have. There are other alternatives from IBM such as Aspera, which is in use across a majority of the media sector and can fairly easily constitute a strong file share offering when paired with cloud object storage

[AClownsPocket]

swerni said:

Sorry don't mean to derail this thread but lets extrapolate.
Cloud services like O365 and others = multi tenancy..
Multi tenancy = far less requirement for infrastructure.
Less infrastructure = less people required.
And if you knew the automation being used and developed by the likes of Microsoft and AWS you'd realise that means even less people.

I come from a life time of infrastructure and the last 15 / 18 years in vendor land.
The storage market declined last year for the first time ever, do you think people are storing less? Or dedupe / compression is getting that much better? Or it's a blip?
It isn't, it's a st towards public cloud.
Look at Arrow's or Avnets figures ( not Tech Data) they speak for themselves.

I've had a great ride selling tin, but while people will always buy, the market is noticeably and undeniably shrinking

OP go cloud based, really, but research and go with someone reputable.

You just made me redundant, cheers

[anonymous-user]

I work for a large corporate and we are moving to https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces for collaborative working. It's a pretty powerful desktop as a service tool, allowing you to access applications from pretty much any device. Bit like Citrix but better. We also use Slack which is a great free instant messaging tool.

Edited by anonymous-user on Monday 13th March 16:28

[GnuBee]

DELETED: Comment made by a member who's account has been deleted.

The WorkSpaces offering is a desktop as a service. You can select Windows 7 or Windows 10 with some bundles including Microsoft Office. You can also opt to bring your own licence (BYOL) which is an opt out of shared tenancy (which you may need to do anyway if you need to meet internal or external requirements around compliance etc)

The charging model is pay as you go with some subtleties; a standard Workspace is always on and is charged on a per month basis. You can elect to have auto-stop instances which are pay per hour - they have a fixed "ground rent" with a charge per hour of usage on top and work well if your users are not going to rack up more than circa 80 hrs per month.

The WorkSpaces client is available for Windows <x>, OSX, IoS, Android and there's a web version although be aware it comes with some limitations. Client devices can be low spec. Minimum connectivity requirements are HTTP, SSL and port 4172 UDP/TCP (PCoIP) open.

We're in the process of moving a significant number of people to the service and have had a production capability on it for over 12 months.

[GnuBee]

DELETED: Comment made by a member who's account has been deleted.

Ok, for us the primary motivator to go down the WorkSpaces route is that it acts as an enabler for bring your own device. The cost savings we can realise are largely based on the ability for WorkSpaces to allow us to eliminate the need to provide physical assets AND the ongoing break/fix for those assets.

There are some specific times when, for us, it does make sense to provide the client device (e.g. where WorkSpaces may be an enabler for using a tablet as the single compute device).

The answer to the question around offline access is - we don't. That's a part of the risk profile of moving to a cloud based DAAS - you're introducing a dependency on the availability of Internet connectivity. This is one of the reasons why we take a pragmatic approach to not just this but many Cloud based technologies - understanding your use cases is key as is understanding that, whilst some may suggest otherwise, Cloud is not always the answer to everything that ails you.

[dmsims]

Max

thanks for all info