Business Drivers
Applications are essential to your day-to-day operation, delivering them to your users is a fundamental business requirement. The increasing needs for greater business flexibility and agility, reduced costs and greater security are driving organisations to consider how best to meet the challenges of an enterprise-wide, end-to-end application delivery strategy.Today’s business growth demands are being fuelled by the formation of strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions. To better serve users, many organisations open branch offices, from regional to worldwide locations. Whilst these measures offer immediate potential to increase revenue and profitability, undoubtedly one of the biggest business risks of these ventures is how to manage the integration of disparate IT business operations.
The ever-present demand to do more-with-less, along with growing concerns of a potential downturn in the worldwide economy fuelled by the recent subprime mortgage financial crisis in the US, IT budgets and the balance of CAPEX and OPEX have become an increasingly important consideration for many UK organisations. Companies will look to streamline operations and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) in delivering business services to users, by seeking efficiencies gained from improved infrastructure management and consolidation.
Corporate responsibility is also driving many organisations to consider the impact of their own carbon footprint and power consumption levels, moving towards more energy efficient solutions.
The dramatic rise of widespread security threats, the distributed nature of many organisations and increased corporate governance and compliance needs are demanding better data access protection, improved security and greater control of data and extensive auditing and reporting.
Emerging technologies such as virtualisation and streaming along with established and proven application services architectures enable the dynamic coupling of people and applications. However, with users demanding even greater application performance, remote and mobile access and expecting the highest service levels, a well-designed, cost-effective, end-to-end application delivery strategy is rapidly becoming of vital importance for many organisation’s IT strategies.
Vistorm's Solution
By using an integrated application services delivery framework based on the combination of industry acknowledged technologies from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, Vistorm is able to provide a comprehensive approach for organisations to meet these demands. Vistorm’s methodology, vision, depth of experience and technical expertise in architecting and implementing server-centric solutions ensures a flexible, reliable, secure and performance-oriented application service infrastructure that is aligned with your business requirements.There are a number of challenges in determining an appropriate application services strategy for an organisation. These include understanding the application landscape (types of applications), application usage scenarios across various departments, access locations of users and available communications bandwidth (e.g. LAN, WAN, remote offices, home-working, internet cafes, hotels, etc.), access devices required (PC desktops, mobile laptops, thin client terminals, PDAs), the security, integrity and management capability of those devices, delivery of required applications to the device (installed, published virtually or streamed and isolated), the authorisation for application use, the management of the user’s environment and finally how to best manage the entire estate of applications and device assets.
Vistorm’s Professional Services practice uses a disciplined approach, based on a standard framework, to either tactically address individual application delivery challenges or formulate and implement the entire desktop and application strategy for an organisation. This framework is a multi-stage process that includes planning, customer consultation, assessment, system design and specification, proof of concept work, scalability testing, system piloting and production deployment, extending to skills transfer, training and on-going support services.
Vistorm partners with the following, leading software and hardware vendors, incorporating FAT, Thin and Web-based services technologies within a solution.
- Citrix Presentation Server and Microsoft Terminal Services as the foundation of a centralised application and desktop service
- Wyse and HP for Thin Client terminals for flexible, low-cost desktop devices
- VMware VDI and Citrix XenDesktop for virtual desktop infrastructure delivery
- VMware VI3, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Virtual Server (Hyper-V) for server virtualisation
- Application packaging, streaming, deployment and update capabilities are provided by Citrix, Altiris and Microsoft SoftGrid technologies
- Management of the user environment and printing is delivered using AppSense Management Suite and ThinPrint .print technologies
- Software and hardware asset and patch Management is provided by Microsoft System Center (SMS, MOM), Altiris Client/Server Management Suite and Patchlink
- Secure remote access using SSL VPN appliances from Citrix, Juniper and F5
- Optimised web application services using Citrix, Juniper and F5 appliances
- Optimised WAN links using Bluecoat, Citrix, Juniper and Packeteer
