Understanding Amazon Web Services (AWS) End-User Computing

End-User Computing (EUC) refers to computer systems, platforms, and applications that are delivered via network connectivity (or internet) to an end user. EUC has been around for many years, with the customer usually having to buy expensive hardware like servers and storage to stand up the EUC environment.

During this year of uncertainty and the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been many issues within schools, colleges, and universities globally on how to deliver student applications.

In today’s pandemic times, we are finding more and more customers and end users are working remotely from home. This requires users to access a number of devices, including laptops and tablets, while at home. Is this secure? Absolutely not.

One way to overcome a lot of the previously mentioned challenges and concerns with storing such large amounts of unstructured data is to move it to a public cloud provider. As for the previously discussed challenges of legacy NAS filers, most of those concerns would no longer be applicable. Essentially, you would be paying the cloud provider to worry about all the infrastructure concerns like capacity, performance, uptime, H/W support, and so on.

Should the dreaded day that your organization suffers a ransomware attack arrive, the severity of the damage could vary from a simple file system encryption to a total lockout. Depending upon the misfortune your IT team is dealt with, the recovery process could possibly consist of a total wipe of the servers, storage, backups, especially critical systems, logical configurations, and property. The most difficult thing to swallow is when you thought you had everything covered in your disaster recovery or backup systems—only to find out the opposite is true.

In prior blog posts, I’ve explained the difference between unstructured, structured, and semi-structured data, and shared the value of unstructured data. In this blog post, I would like to focus on what I believe are the primary barriers preventing organizations from tapping into their unstructured data for analysis.

Performance, Capacity, Scalability, Availability, Security, and Recoverability: These are all pillars of a multi-cloud data center strategy. In the past, applications were dependent on the on-premises data center infrastructure. “What you see is what you get” was pretty much how application developers had to deal with it. Today, the business dictates how an organization deploys data center resources to support an application. For a commercial business, the desire is for the application to generate significantly large amounts of data traffic that translates into revenue. For the public sector, it’s about getting information to and from the community at a rapid pace.

In my last blog post, I explained the value of unstructured data. In this post, I'd like to define structured and semi-structured data to further explain the meaning of unstructured data.

When employees were first sent to work from home, organizations scrambled to provide work-from-home software, devices, and infrastructure. As we transition to a new normal, it’s now important to reevaluate the initial infrastructure laid to support remote workers against a lasting, best-practice architecture. In the last entry, I shared the first three pillars for a thriving remote workforce. Let’s now explore the final three pillars.

Operating a remote workforce is no longer just a remote possibility. A work-from-home war is being quietly waged across many organizations throughout the country, as workers who were forced to quickly establish home office environments now wish to remain in their home rather than return to commuting to an office. This tipping point has deep and wide ramifications for organizations attempting to return to pre-COVID-19 productivity levels.