During this podcast, VMware partners heard from Carahsoft's Nick Wager, Vmware Pre-Sales System Engineer.
Speaker 1: On behalf of VMware and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast, delivering an intuitive digital workspace to customers. Today's speaker is Nick Wager.
Nick Wager: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining. Like we said, my name is Nick Wager. I'm a VMware Certified engineer over here at Carahsoft. And the goal today is to walk through VMware’s end user computing platform called workspace one. And just discuss how you can support a seamless experience for an anywhere workforce and empower users with an intelligent digital workspace. Now, at the core of any customer, right? Is there apps in their data to power their organizations in the face of any sort of uncertainty? Now, there's really five critical building blocks to worry about. There's, you know, how do we modernize our applications? You know, how can we support a multi-cloud world, you know, these two things go together kind of form the core stack that VMware can help address. And, you know, we'll cover those in the follow up webcast here. And then there's the digital workspace, you know, this is the key to driving and user engagement, while virtual cloud networking kind of underlies it all. And then wrapped around all of this is Intrinsic Security. No, VMware is really uniquely positioned because they have their own unique and powerful solutions that hook into every part of this puzzle. Today's webcast is very much focused on the digital workspace, you know, helping customers reach a future ready workforce, customers in the last year or so have been forced to consider how are we going to handle things going forward, right, you'll get 2019. And a lot of customers were pretty much 100% in the office, you know, at the work location. And you look at the last year or so, and a lot of folks were 100% remote. Going into the future, you know, we're not going to see either of those scenarios, we're going to see major changes in the way that organizations support their end users, you know, people are going to be working in more varied locations, and in more varied ways. So our customers, they need to have the infrastructure in the tools in place to support that end user desire to work from anywhere, and in a way that makes a lot of sense to them. As they come up with their plans for the future and evaluate the problems they're going to need to address. Now new problems are gonna pop up, as the number of devices that people are using continues to rise, you know, as the number of locations that we need to consider continues to rise. You know, as folks adopt new technologies for mobile, and for cloud, you know, they need to have the management and security tools in place that can support and incorporate these new scenarios and give it and end users the flexibility they're going to be looking for in the future. As environments become more complex, you know, our customers are going to run into all sorts of different challenges. It's not easy to create an anywhere organization, you know, one that can support these multi modal work steps. There's all sorts of new questions that folks are going to run into as they build out a digital workspace, and just adding new products, new solutions to their existing stack, you know, as needs arise, just isn't going to cut it. You know, if you're using fragmented point solutions to answer the questions that you see here, it is going to get bogged down with time consuming, and very manual tasks, and thus won't be able to manage or mitigate risks at scale, and allow for an anywhere type of workforce. Instead, customers have to think about how can we deliver the ideal digital workspace? You know, we always have to keep in mind, how can we share our end user stay engaged? And how can we improve productivity? How can we modernize our infrastructure in the way that we're delivering things? And you know, the ever present concern is how can we embed security throughout the application access process and make it a simple an intrinsic part of our management strategy? You know, the thing that often prevents a lot of today's IT organizations from answering these questions and providing that ideal workspace, you know, is that they're often working with, often stitched together and just a whole slew of different solutions there. You know, when this creates a whole bunch of complexity, and it you know, creates a gap between what the current tool can provide, you know, how they can manage things, what sort of intelligence they can share, and the goals that it is trying to achieve, you know, that really hinders our customers efforts to create an anywhere organization, and especially one that can support a multitude of work styles of devices of new technologies, and you know, of new workplaces. And, you know, as we talk to customers and help them along this digital workspace journey, we always have to keep in mind that every customer is going to have really unique mix of solutions in place, and needs to be to that needs that need to be addressed. You know, as customers move forward with supporting multiple work styles and workplaces, we need to remember that for most folks know, the journey to the digital workspace can involve up to four it silos. And that to complete this sort of journey, these silos will need to align and converge. You know, each of these silos have probably taken some sort of step, you know, along this journey. So what they really need is a solution that can seamlessly slot into their current environments and help propel them forward. And VMware Digital workspace solution workspace, one can help them do exactly that, you know, as a complete digital workspace platform, workspace, one goes a real long way to improving end user engagement, giving end users access to a simple and complete Self Service Catalog with that requires minimal clicks, and minimal fuss. You know, from an IT perspective, customers can easily modernize the way that they're managing devices and delivering applications. You know, it comes with in depth analytics, and automated remediation. And workspace, one really can ensure that every step of the application access process is secure, by ensuring that the devices are trustworthy, that the person is who they say there, that the network connection is secure. And that the applications themselves are secure as well that they haven't been abused. You know, it was all set up as a real seamless workflow through conditional access policies. That goes a long way to ensuring security for the organization. But it's simple and invisible to the end user. So they get a real nice experience while they're at it. And as you talk to customers, there's a few pillars that you need to keep in mind when discussing workspace one. And when it comes to user experience and improving engagement, workspace one delivers a better experience to end users as it frees them to make the same sort of flexible choices that they're used to making in their personal lives. You know, they won't have to endure restrictions imposed by locked down Windows PCs, you know, that a lot of folks you'll deal with today. New policies are delivered inside the workspace and you know, that that allows the separation of work and personal applications and data, all on the same mobile device. Users can leverage the functionality of their favorite devices for both personal and organization related activities. And they can still use one set of credentials, and authentication processes, they can do that all while being real confident that their personal information and data will remain secure. So if you've got any folks that want to adopt BYOD type scenarios, or they want to use a whole slew of different device types and use cases. Now workspace, one can go a long way to making sure that's a smooth experience for end users now and improve security and compliance is delivered by the support teams being able to push security updates to devices that are anywhere on the network, no matter how remote or distant they might be, whether they're on the work network or not. And this is made possible by having real time awareness of where endpoints happened to be and the potential threat that they pose to the wider organization. Now, there are additional policy systems that allow support teams to deliver the same or similar levels of security to the modern day device that they're used to doing with legacy Windows applications from the past. You know, VMware can also optionally help add additional security by deploying integrating technologies such as micro segmentation, which isolates applications to specific networks, and specific security and firewall restrictions, or SD Wham which ensures a good network performance for anywhere organization. And lower cost is delivered by simplifying operating system deployment for say, your legacy Windows applications. And you know, mostly by consolidating the multiple management tools that are used by support teams, and taking that down to a single unified endpoint management tool. This empowers the IT department to leverage all the infrastructure resources that are at their disposal. It allows them to choose the best platform with which to deliver an application and to change it seamlessly As circumstances have all, you know, costs are driven down by simplifying the configuration of applications and their lifecycle management. And at the same time, it means administration tasks can be applied once. And then they can configure multiple devices, rather than having to repeat a bunch of tasks with separate vendor specific tools. And you know, that part is accomplished exactly by workspace one UVM unified endpoint management. You know, it allows customers to manage any endpoint, running any operating system. And to address any use case was workspace one UEM, that component of workspace one, customers can collapse all those management silos that they're probably used to. And they can collapse it down to one single html5 based console that provides full lifecycle management, and security and analytics for the entire device fleet, no matter how complex that might be, no matter where they're located, no matter what use cases they've got. Workspace one is really special, because it allows any app to be accessed on any device, anywhere in the world. And to do that well easily with minimal clicks, and minimal fuss. And when I say any device on any operating system, I really do mean, workspace, one has unique hooks into all the operating systems that your customers are using, providing Day Zero support updates and complete management of the entire device fleet. No matter whether we're talking iOS devices, you know, Android devices, Windows PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, and even your nontraditional endpoint style devices, you can manage them all with one tool, rather than a bunch of difference in separate vendor specific solutions. And, you know, that provides a real unique advantage. When workspace one is managing someone's entire device fleet and all their applications, you know, workspace one, intelligence can come in and take all this real time data about a customer's endpoints, the identity layer, you know, who sign again, where are they sending it, what sort of networks they're on, could take in data about their applications. And, you know, it can take in all this information, aggregated and provide real actionable intelligence. Now, that way customers, rather than rely on anecdotal information or stories, you know, they can make data driven decisions to improve security to ensure user experience, you know, that way they can resolve issues quickly. You know, not only that, but workspace, one intelligence can take all of this data and provide real powerful automation, you know, once we detect a certain condition has been met, we can reach out to several other solutions, third party or otherwise, then go and automatically fix problems, help meet security requirements, and ensure smooth operations and productivity for our end users. Just give you an example of what some of those workflows look like, you know, let's look at how workspace one intelligence can help improve user experience. You know, in the modern digital workspace, the IT department has to be able to respond quickly and decisively to any sort of degradation in user experience. You know, in the past, it was quite difficult for it to do anything about this making it almost seem as if they were remote or unconcerned about the user experience, because it just couldn't do much. And this is mainly because the tools they had didn't allow them to effectively and accurately measure the user experience. It's difficult to definitively measure how many users were running an application. And the IT department was relying on this anecdotal reports of performance, slowdowns were often a reflection of subjective measures that made it difficult for support teams to quantify the impact, you know that that was occurring. Workspace, one proactively responds to the changing experience of the user. You know, in this respect, Application Management begins to mirror the experience already enjoy with you know, app stores that exist for smartphones and tablets. With this sort of improved visibility. IT admins can, for example, see a decrease in application usage. You know, from this initial trigger, they can gather and analyze data to see why this is happening. Typically, a decline in usage is caused by an increase of users coming frustrated with an application and deciding not to use it or go using a unapproved alternative. Now, this can be an indication that they've worked around the internal IT policies to use an application that hasn't been authorized. That's the phenomenon known as shadow it and it's everywhere. workspace one, on the other hand, allows the IT department to spot these sorts of trends quickly, such as identifying which users have used an application within a given period communicating with those Through notifications, and pushing application updates to address problems, that way the user experience can be quickly and easily addressed relying on real concrete information. In the past, IT departments really only had the desktop PC and use your platform to monitor and to remediate, you know, things have really changed since then, you know, things have really transformed. You know, now the support teams have a range of applications residing on a variety of devices to be concerned about. As the number of users online has grown exponentially as the number of devices has grown exponentially, you know, the number of security threats has grown right alongside it. You know, additionally, threats that once took weeks or months to proliferate online can often spread in hours or minutes. So the IT department has to adopt a more agile approach to application and device security, not just the app deployment. Workspace one allows the support team to identify both application and device vulnerabilities. Workspace one also detects the presence of applicable updates, and automatically deploys those security patches to any affected devices, monitoring for possible security vulnerabilities in applications or devices. You know, that happens continuously based on real time data, with remediation taking place as needed. Once problems arise. The digital workspace is not just about providing application access or managing the physical devices. It's not just about the desktop that's running on the computer horizon can play a big virtual desktops can play a big part in empowering users with the digital workspace, you know, folks are using Chromebooks more and more often, they're using iPads and iPhones and Android devices. But you know, 29% of the apps that are out there today are Windows applications. You know, that's what folks have relied on. That's what they're used to, you know, that's what they based a lot of their processes on. So if you want to allow for BYOD programs, you know, where folks are going to be using Macs and iOS devices, and androids and Chromebooks and, you know, all these different things, you know, you're still going to need to provide those end users some way to get into the Windows applications that they need. And an easy way to do that is with virtual desktops, you know, those can be running up in your personal data center, or in one of the big public clouds, you can run Windows machines out there in the internet. And then as long as they've got a, you know, kind of bare minimum internet connection, it doesn't matter what sort of operating system they have, doesn't matter how powerful their machine is, doesn't matter where they're located in the world, we can still give them access to full Windows machines, you know, available locally in their web browser, or individual Windows applications that are accessible at their convenience. And by delivering desktops in this way from the data center from the cloud, you know, like it can provide better security, you know, it's easy to manage, when they're all running in one central locations, applications can often work better when they're running in the data center on a virtual desktop. And, you know, the data center itself provides real high performance computing resources that you're difficult to get on an endpoint. You know, rather than getting everybody a real powerful laptop, you can get everybody real low cost a Chromebooks or thinner zero clients. And, you know, you server grade resources up in the data center to provide a high experience without the devices and you end users hands, requiring those sorts of resources. Workspace one and modern management, you know, they play a real big role in the management of physical devices, you know, it pushes down updates and patches and manages devices and provides contextual access. But horizon is an important part of the digital workspace because it provides a way for folks who might not be on a Windows machine to get access to those resources that they need. Workspace one is not just for those modern day applications that are delivered using the latest cloud based SaaS platforms. You know, it also excels at transforming you know, those Windows applications that persist in organizations to this day, users they often demand the same level of accessibility and ease of use that they're used to with these legacy applications. Despite the fact that they might have never been designed to work in this way. You know, things have changed a lot from the time a lot of these applications came out. People are, you know, working from home. They're using all sorts of different devices, but they still want to use the time types of services that there used to. With workspace one with horizon, you can transform these applications, you can make them accessible anywhere, rather than being bonded to a Windows PC, where they were first developed and deployed. You know, and because these Windows apps inherit the same security policies that are delivered by workspace one, you know, it's possible to impose tougher rules about how they function. Legacy Windows applications often included more serious security bugs and flaws, that can't really be fixed today, not without breaking the application. Now this is because many Windows apps were developed and designed under less rigorous security constraints and can't always be retrofitted with fixes. With workspace one, you can mitigate against the risk of such legacy applications by keeping them off the local device and limiting their use of the network. You know, by deploying workspace, one customers can separate the underlying Windows operating system from the Windows application, we can make settings and preferences of users more portable and accessible. And this allows the IT department to more stringently harden the Windows operating system and prevent improper access to features and functions. Alright, so we take all of that information together. And we think you know, how can we build in anywhere workspace for organizations, and VMware has all the puzzle pieces to do that to support all these different work styles and work locations. You know, some of these solutions will be covered in more depth, but they do all slot seamlessly together, they support the user in the employee experience. And more secure access service edge, you know, is there to ensure the network works and it works well and that it's secure. Carbon Black can chip in and protect your inputs can make sure legitimate software and services and you know all that stuff doesn't get abused, which is a real common way that attackers come after things. And they all integrate with each other. They provide a real smooth and a real good experience to end users as we're supporting an anywhere workspace for folks. So to wrap this up, you know, just want to point out, you know, how can we make money selling the digital workspace? No, VMware has real good advantage plus discounts that are available, you know, across the digital workspace portfolio. Note that for workspace one, the minimum deal size will vary according to you know what solution as at stake here you know, workspace one intelligence for example, that's 10k minimum, where you know, workspace one standard or advanced you know, it's much lower at one. But either way you can get real good discounting and provide customers real good pricing while you're standing in your role as a trusted business adviser for all your customers.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or VMware can assist your organization, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at vmware@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.