Case Study: A Leading Cloud Solutions Provider Leverages Cloudpaging for DaaS

How a Leading Cloud Provider Uses Cloudpaging to Provision Applications Within its DaaS Offering

Overview

A leading cloud storage and services provider delivers a fast, flexible, and secure way for its user base to deploy and manage applications for its Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform. The platform is designed to accelerate software deployment, upgrades, patching, and retirement by packaging Microsoft Windows desktop applications into Cloudpaging containers. These applications run on customer DaaS instances as if natively installed. This allows its primary users to install their own applications, or purchase desktop applications through its online application software store to deploy them to multiple end-users on the account while maintaining control of the users’ access to those applications. Simple, pay-as-you-go, user-based pricing ensures that customers only pay for the applications that are being used.

But it wasn’t always this way…

The Problem: Managing Applications for Hundreds of Thousands of Virtual Desktops

This particular organization first built its DaaS platform to offer a “Desktop in the Cloud” for its customers. The company quickly realized providing the desktop was only going to solve a portion of the customer needs. Customers had a clear need for application lifecycle management for their respective DaaS instances. This was made increasingly difficult due to the fact that each customer has different policies, requirements, and expectations for their respective lifecycle management needs. As such, a “one size fits all” solution would not work. Customers would expect the same level of performance from their applications on the DaaS platform as they did from their physical desktops. They would also need compatibility with all Windows applications whether they bought them directly from the cloud provider, installed their own application (aka “Bring Your Own Application” or BYOA), or used a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model. The organization needed to address all customer concerns while adhering to its own business and regulatory requirements. Global scalability and high performance were critical, as the DaaS platform is utilized by hundreds of thousands of users daily. Another priority was reducing storage requirements for both the cloud provider and its customers to provide optimal pricing for end users. They also sought to automate as many processes as possible to remove manual efforts and optimize costs. The goal was to seamlessly integrate automation capabilities with its existing application store. A large part of this was monitoring application usage data for billing, as well as deploying, updating, and removing software.

The Solution: Cloud Application Virtualization

The organization found Numecent’s Cloudpaging technology to be the only out-of-the-box solution that could meet all their DaaS requirements. Cloudpaging also contained additional features beyond the company’s requirements that added additional value and eliminated other potential custom work for the company’s team. Cloudpaging provides excellent Application Lifecycle Management with a Software Asset Management (SAM) model that can be fully integrated with and extended by application stores. Applications can be easily packaged, deployed, updated, and removed without leaving a trace. Applications run as if natively installed on end user’s DaaS instance, without actually installing on client devices. Proprietary Cloudpaging technology reduces application footprints to less than 10% of the space occupied by a native installation. This significantly reduces storage and network requirement costs both for the customer and for the DaaS provider. Cloudpaging also includes a full-featured set of APIs allowing the leading cloud storage and services provider to easily automate all application activities on both the client- and server-side as well as seamlessly integrate into the existing DaaS console. This allowed further integration with the company’s additional services including Microsoft Active Directory connections to provision applications to specific users. The flexible architecture and billing options also allow the leading cloud storage and services provider to fully track application usage, centrally manage applications, and offer pricing models that are based on actual usage. Customers love receiving one clear and concise bill from a single provider for all their DaaS and application usage.

Results and Benefits

An automated platform for users to select from hundreds of applications it provides for free or at a cost. Easy facilitation of BYOL and BYOA applications. Instant application provisioning. Extensible digital rights management component that allows entitlement, provisioning, and upgrades to be centrally controlled and extended upon by using a set of Web APIs by system integrators. Microsoft Windows applications may be packaged and deployed to users throughout any customer’s organization. Ability to build and manage an application catalog of third-party applications that includes already owned licenses, internally-developed custom applications, and applications purchased through its online store for desktop applications by leveraging these APIs. Introduce new revenue streams as a Managed Service Provider.

*Sample Network and Storage Costs