Xen and the Art of Working from the Cloud: What’s your Horizon?
An easy, scalable, secure and cost-effective Work From Home Solution using Oracle Cloud
Jeremy Bailenson and his team at Stanford spent over two decades exploring VR’s ability to produce behavioral change. He develops first-person VR experiences illustrating racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. For instance, experiencing what it would be like to be an elderly, homeless, woman of color living on the streets of a large city. It produces a lasting change, a significant shift in empathy and understanding. Working from home has a similar effect.
Industries that have a large, distributed, access-regulated, frontline workforce is where the impact is acute. For eg. Employees from a Banking Branch, HR & Payroll processing, R&D Centers in a Bonded, Special Economic Zone. These were business functions, where access to business data was limited to the confines of office spaces.
How does one ensure the same experience as working from office? How does one take care of security? What about access control? What kind of network do we need to ensure applications run well? What about the cost? Are other projects are suffering as a result of excessive focus on WFH solutions up & running! We have never done it before!
As strong enterprise partners, we at Oracle have been having several conversations with our customers. IT & Procurement teams are working against time to responding to remote work requirements.
Panic Causes Tunnel Vision — Simon Sinek
In several conversations, we realized that Enterprises were making decisions based on limited experience and were setting themselves up for several issues in the future.
Companies have two modes of operations: peacetime and wartime.
Peacetime is when things are going well. This is when we are growing as a company and can continue business as usual.
Wartime is well, our current situation.
What Enterprises expect as outcomes from work from home solutions is having a productive, nimble frontline workforce to win the war. But realizing that all the soldiers have been stuck in port for three years.
Enterprises are not very different from humans. During times of crisis, we tend to make automatic, sometimes even myopic judgments. These stem from associations stored in memory. Instead of logically working through all of the available information. There is no doubt that System 1 is critical to survival. It is natural for us to assume that this supersedes everything else. It’s what makes you swerve to avoid a car accident. Daniel Kahneman terms this as “System 1 thinking” — we could even call this reflex.
To become the automatic, no-brainer purchase is the greatest success a brand can achieve — and it requires command of System 1 brain processing.
While it is undeniable that a VPN / VDI / Remote Desktop solution is an indispensable part of an end-user computing portfolio. It is hardly a good approximation for a diverse set of End-User-Computing requirements.
What is End-User Computing in the context of an enterprise?
It is a set of techniques, technology & methods that organizations use to facilitate application & data access to the right business end-users
Every Enterprise is a Software Company
A report published by McAfee finds that an average enterprise deploys about 464 custom applications and a lot of them are much more than a standard run of the mill desktop/web application. There are several modes of access and several forms of hosting them.
End-User Computing Requirements — Business Continuity Goals
Fastest, Easiest & Cheapest
Needs to get set-up in a day or two at least if not hours.
Scale and Extend, what I already have
Pay only for what I need additionally and when I use it.Contactless Onboarding
How do I deliver this service to end-users and onboard them if they haven't been enrolled already without having to physically meet them?Meeting security & regulatory requirements
Understand changed goalposts, as I may have to connect through the internet, with an untrusted device ? How do I make sure I minimize risk and stay compliant ?While still delivering Business as Usual
How do I still give my business-users a familiar environment they are used to working on, without having to deal with training the workforce.
In a typical enterprise, with a highly distributed workforce, the solution is always, a combination of several components listed below. It also happens to change from User to User. It is always a combination of one or several of these components for different sets of business users.
Hosting Methods/Choice of Deployment
Whose Data Center and how much of it needs to be customized
Infrastructure On-Premise
On the Cloud as a combination of IaaS & PaaS
On the cloud as a SaaSServing Methods
One could almost look at the serving methods as Server-Side Components
VDI & Virtual Apps
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure & Application Virtualization
Used when end-user device standardization is hardDaaS
Desktops as a ServiceVPN
Virtual Private Network
Mostly Used when the users have a corporate laptop or there are established ways to standardize end-user-devicesVirtual Workspaces
File Sharing, Collaboration Suites, Etc.
Consumption Methods
Some of the common ways in which business end-users consume business applications
1) Thin / Thick Client
2) Mobile / Desktop
3) Corporate Approved / Bring Your Own Device
4) General Purpose / Special hardwareCommon Denominators
Immaterial of what combination an enterprise chooses to use, some of the indispensable components are as follows
Identity, Directory, Access-Management & Security
How enterprises establish the identity of their users
Role Based & Privileged Access Control
Enhancing security with contextual information
(Eg. location, time, device etc.)Endpoint Management & Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM)
Device Lifecycle management in conjunction with User Management
Inherited, Conditional, Governed Device access
Protect the end-user device like a company asset by installing protective softwareFirewalls, both Network & Web Application Firewalls
Because Security.
All of these auxiliary services could be either open-source or licensed customized off-the-shelf solutions. Here’s what Oracle has to offer
Our Partnership with Citrix
Our partnership with VMWare
Oracle Cloud is much more than Infrastructure:
Identity, Interoperability & Multi-Cloud
We can help you with identity, extend and integrate what you already have or easily set up cloud-native identity, read more about our partnership with Microsoft and how we can help you extend to the cloud when required.
Multi-Cloud Security
When access patterns change, and adjusting to remote access patterns, in a multi-cloud world, multi-cloud, Cloud Access Security Brokers are far more relevant than they have ever been, Oracle CASB is not just for Oracle Cloud PaaS or SaaS, it works seamlessly with Office 365, Salesforce and even AWS to name a few
Web Application Security
Most Virtual Workspace, VDI, EUC Solutions have relied on traditional application delivery mechanisms and securing them with traditional firewalls, and since access patterns are going to be from an untrusted network and over the web, read more about how a tightly integrated Oracle WAF can help secure your Virtual Workplace
Competitive enterprises are looking to do much more than just “Get-By/Survive” the pandemic.
End-User Computing — Digital Transformation Goals
Scalable, Resilient, Agile, End-User Experience, ImpactfulSeveral business-user personas consume a diverse set of applications
Local Workstation based or Web Based
Graphics Intensive or Compute Intensive
Data Intensive / Analytics Intensive
Centralized or DistributedData Science Teams
Your organization’s data science team uses workstations extensively but hardly uses Desktop applications. A Serverless, Jupyter notebook based environment would make more sense. Exploratory data analysis to zero-maintenance model serving could be your data science team’s need. Especially when infrastructure teams are working in BCP.
Design & Simulation Teams
Another business function that uses Workstations extensively and what traditional VDI setups can’t address. These teams mostly use hyper-specialized software for niche business functions for eg. Finite Element Analysis or Failure Simulation with High-Performance Computing clusters. They could have special networking requirements, eg. an RDMA Cluster Network used for accelerated Spark Data processing,
Internal Dev Teams
Several enterprises have a large landscape of vendor developed software. They also have small, closely-knit, functional Internal IT team. They don’t have the toolchain needed for supporting a distributed remotely working, internal dev team. This could start from having a distributed Version Control repo like Git. Check out a secure, private and dedicated, fully managed Developer Cloud Service that could help you
Portals, Documents & Shared Workspaces
What if we told you, you could set up a mobile-ready, serverless, document sharing & management system with secure yet, powerful collaboration capabilities, accelerated by a global content delivery network, in minutes with Oracle Content and Experience Cloud
In Summary, we urge you to look at your Work from Home Solutions increasingly as Work from the Cloud Solutions. Oracle’s solution provides you with the following advantages:
- Security — Security, Governance, Identity & Compliance are the fundamental tenets and Oracle Cloud Operates on a Zero Trust model. Oracle’s Corporate Security Program is designed to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of both Oracle and customer data.
- Locality and Simplicity — The Oracle Gen 2 Cloud Infrastructure is within India and we have a simple solution with partners like Citrix & VMWare.
- Business Centric — Business people can see features or apps and don’t see the vast architectures underneath that support them, connecting systems, teams, and data to each other. We have a solution that understands this.
- Cloud Economics — According to digital strategist, author, and cloud computing expert Joe Weinman, the value of cloud computing goes beyond the money that is spent and hits at the heart of innovation. The cloud changes the economics of innovation — a new cloud economy allows you to save money and make money. As a cloud company, Oracle provides as a subscription much of what used to consume 80 percent of IT budgets on-premises. This can create significant savings in terms of hardware and the number of people needed to manage and maintain it. As Weinman says, the key driver for cost reduction in the cloud is what you pay when you don’t use it: zero.
Talk to us if you want to Work from the Cloud.
About the authors
Mitesh Agarwal: VP of Global Key Accounts, Oracle India
Vamsi Ramakrishnan: Solutions Engineer, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Both of them work for Oracle but the views expressed here are personal. They do not represent any official view of Oracle as a company or any of its partners.
