Workspace Services & Workspace Delivery – The engine room of mobility

By David Barclay, National Practice Manager, Data^#3

The challenge that I hear regularly when it comes to enterprise mobility is “where do I start?” Once you have an understanding of what true enterprise mobility means to your organisation and what it can deliver, you start to realise how big the challenge can be.

To help answer this question, Data^#3 developed a mobility framework that breaks out the core components of a mobility solution to help guide your thinking, showing you where to start and how to proceed.

In a previous post, we’ve discussed the users and devices layers of this framework. What differentiates traditional Mobile Device Management (MDM) based approaches and enterprise mobility lies in the Workspace Services and Workspace Delivery layers – these are the engine rooms of enterprise mobility.

Workspace Services provides an abstraction layer between your users and the complexity of IT needed to support mobility. It provides a consistent, device independent, unified experience to support day-to-day activities.

It is based on four key components:

• Content: how you present all the information users need whilst taking into account what should or shouldn’t be accessible.
• Service Catalogue: how do you deliver the applications and services to a user
• Collaboration: how information is used to enable collaboration without breaching security rules
• Identity & Authentication: the security that follows the user and information (not the device) without getting in the way of day-to-day productivity.

To be able to deliver these services, you need to understand the Workspace Delivery layer – the underlying technology that makes these services accessible. It includes physical and virtual desktops (VDI), application virtualisation, SaaS, application remoting and mobile apps.

The elements of the Workspace Delivery layer are not in isolation of each other. You can combine various technologies depending on your environment, including business or application requirements – such as a remoted application within a VDI session.

A well constructed Workspace Delivery layer allows you to cater for different user scenarios that take into account what they need to do and how they need to access it – within the context of where they’re accessing it from. You can take hosted applications or virtual applications (including legacy apps if needed) and deliver them side by side with mobile apps so the user experience is immersive and seamless.

It’s important to note though that you don’t necessarily need to implement all the components of these layers in your mobility solution. Our framework defines an overall, best-practice approach that you can use to compare against your current investments, technology and strategy to identify gaps – you can then decide how to address those gaps.

The framework provides a very structured, methodical approach to understanding what enterprise mobility can do, how to get started and how to deliver an optimal outcome.

To learn more about the Data^#3 Mobility framework visit https://data3.com/theanywhereworkplace/