Guest Blog: Bill Magee on How Cloud is Good for Business
Guest Blog
We asked BizTech writer, Bill Magee to write a guest blog following our successful Roundtable event in partnership with Citrix and Microsoft (held on August 22nd).
The event was enjoyed by a mix of attendees with some having already made the move to a Hybrid Cloud environment
Bottom line to a Capito-organised Roundtable Discussion also featuring Citrix and Microsoft at the software giant's Waverley Gate Edinburgh HQ, is that myths surrounding the move to the Cloud as being somehow bad for business are finally consigned to the digital dustbin.
Capito's Head of Sales and Marketing Robert Pate, Iain Begg, Sales Manager, Scotland for Citrix and his colleague Senior Systems Engineer, Toby Brown (pictured), plus Microsoft's Account Technology Strategist, Andrew Ord (pictured below right), together laid it on the line about the commercial power of all things Cloud.
The Roundtable discussion attracted a healthy number of delegates and here are detailed comments of two participants:
Andrew Millar, Customer Support Team Manager for NHS National Services Scotland, and his team are responsible for ensuring end-to-end efficient, effective and safe IT services ensuring clinical and information governance is embedded in all as support to NHS Scotland and other public sector customers.
Andrew told me: "We've been using VMWare as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for a number of our desktops for some years as an on-premise solution, so the hardware refresh is very expensive.
"So we started to decommission it but we still have a specific use case especially involving remote workers sometimes on the end of a 4G dongle or ropey guest WiFi somewhere. We are looking for a new Cloud-based solution in the next 12 months to fill that gap and minimise the amount of support required.
"We will be coming back to Capito and Citrix to see what fits and costs involved per user, per month, per year.
"Probably as a hybrid solution, as of course being the Health Service there is highly sensitive data that will not go onto the Cloud under Data Governance Rules."
Peter Mitchell, Head of Desktop Solutions at University of Glasgow, and his team support around nine-and-a-half thousand workstations and 40,000 staff and student users in total.
He explains: "We got a lot out of today's event - especially when it comes to Sharefile involving students overseas such as China.
"We are early in our journey in respect to VDI and at the moment are looking at an on-premise deployment of a proof of concept supporting 40 XenDesktops and 45 XenApps.
"We want to pilot the use of technology to make sure it is fit for purpose in our environment and, in terms of Cloud, we are interested in on-prem and off-prem integration. This is because we have a rapidly expanding business in South-East Asia, Singapore and in China involving our engineering and business schools. It's all about seeing how we can leverage what the University does in Glasgow to support students out there.
A hybrid-supported deployment of Citrix supported XenDesktops, some we can host in our data centres others hosted in the big Firewall of China, is something that is of interest to us," Peter adds.