Nutanix, the enterprise cloud company, said yesterday its desktop-as-a-service product, Xi Frame, is now available in South Africa. It’s a secure platform that delivers Windows and Linux apps to desktops on any device that supports HTML 5.
Customers will be able to deliver applications and desktops to clients from any location, provisioned via the public cloud or hosted within their Nutanix data centre.
Paul Ruinaard, Nutanix regional sales director for Sub-Saharan Africa, says cloud is becoming increasingly relevant as customers move off-premises to enable working from home (WFH).
“Nutanix has seen an increasing demand from local customers, as a result of the global health pandemic, for an enterprise-grade WFH solution to support a remote desktop environment that they can roll out quickly and scale on the fly.
“It is going to be very hard for businesses to put the work-from-home genie back in the bottle, which has driven the need for virtual workspaces that can safely and seamlessly integrate with their data, applications and storage environments.”
Ruinaard says while it would have been nice to have the product when the lockdown began in South Africa, the work from home trend is now firmly entrenched, and has driven the need for virtual workspaces that can safely integrate with a company’s data, applications and storage environments.
Xi Frame is available locally on-premises, or through Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services, and customers can use their own cloud subscriptions, and/or Nutanix HCI infrastructure, depending on their specific virtual desktop infrastructure needs.
With the platform’s analytics tools, usage and administrative actions can be monitored and costs can be controlled through the optimisation of elastic scaling parameters. Clients can pay as they go based on actual consumption of the service, says Ruinaard.
According to local Nutanix CIO Craigh Stuart, many companies have not been able to transition to working from home as quickly as they would have liked.
“They would still follow the traditional routes of adding VPNs. One day you’re at the office, and then two or three days later, you need to be able to provide a solution than can enable your workforce of thousands to securely work from home.”
Xi Frame has several security features, including non-persistent VMs, data segregation, controls over local and remote data movement, and auditing logs. It meets security standards, including SOC 2 Type 1 and 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018.
Clients who sign up can take part in a free 30-day trial.
Share