This post was authored by Chris Marks, Principal Outbound Product Manager at Parallels
The Challenge: What’s Slowing IT Down
Enterprises today are facing what can only be described as an application and data avalanche. Soon, IT teams could be managing many more applications and dealing with exponential volumes of data. Why? This is due in large part because of the rise of AI, everyone can be a developer, and new applications can be created in a matter of minutes.
This surge in app creation, data, devices, and workloads is putting unprecedented pressure on IT organizations. The resulting data explosion is driving new levels of operational complexity, especially at the edge, where businesses strive to keep data and applications as close to end users as possible for performance and compliance reasons.
At the same time, workloads are constantly moving. Shifts in corporate structure, private equity acquisitions, and evolving cost models are forcing IT teams to move workloads dynamically - between on-prem, edge, and public cloud, - in search of efficiency and performance. The result: a fragmented, inconsistent IT landscape that’s difficult to manage and costly to maintain.
The Complexity Facing IT and EUC Teams
End-user computing (EUC) environments are particularly exposed. As workloads become dispersed across multiple clouds and datacenters, performance predictability suffers. Users expect consistency - they don’t care where apps live, only that performance is fast every day.
Compounding this, rising renewal costs, vendor licensing restrictions, and specialized administration requirements are creating friction. Many organizations are now staffed with generalist IT teams, not large silos of specialists. Yet they’re expected to manage increasingly sophisticated hybrid environments.
All of this leads to one conclusion: IT needs simplicity, choice, and security to regain control.
The Foundation: Simple, Flexible, Secure
At the heart of modern infrastructure success are three guiding principles:
- Simple: Reduce complexity for administrators. Nutanix was built on this promise - converging compute, storage, and networking into one simple platform with one-click management. Parallels RAS also follows this philosophy at the desktop and application delivery layer, giving IT teams a unified console to manage everything from VDI to physical PCs.
- Flexible: No one-size-fits-all approach exists anymore. Organizations need freedom to choose where workloads run - on-prem, at the edge, or in the cloud. With Nutanix’s hybrid cloud infrastructure and Parallels RAS’ multi-cloud capabilities, IT can deploy in the environment that makes the most sense for the business.
- Secure: Every IT leader loses sleep over data protection. Both Nutanix and Parallels RAS are designed with secure architectures, built-in MFA, TLS 1.3 encryption, and seamless integration with enterprise security policies.
These three pillars – simple, flexible,secure - form the blueprint for breaking the IT bottleneck.
The Solution: One Platform, One Console
The joint Nutanix and Parallels RAS solution brings together unified infrastructure and streamlined desktop delivery.
Parallels RAS enables IT to deliver virtual desktops and applications through a single management console, integrating directly with Nutanix AHV. Administrators can manage templates, automate provisioning, and handle updates through built-in wizards that simplify previously complex tasks like image optimization, FSLogix profile management, and SSL certificate renewal.
On the Nutanix side, a software-defined, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) foundation and unique features like data locality provide linear scalability, performance, and resilience. The same platform can now extend into hybrid and multi-cloud environments - managing workloads seamlessly across private data centers, hyperscalers, and edge locations.
In short, it’s one platform to run apps, data, and agents - anywhere.
Hybrid Agility in Action
Imagine deploying thousands of desktops in hours, not days. That’s exactly what Nutanix customers are doing today. Whether scaling up to meet seasonal demands, supporting new acquisitions, or responding to emergencies, the ability to stand up 2,000 desktops in a few hours delivers real business agility.
Workloads can move fluidly - or as Sean Donahue, Solutions Evangelist at Nutanix likes to say, “PowerGlide” - between on-prem, cloud, and edge environments depending on cost, performance, and proximity to users. The result is flexibility without friction, and performance without compromise.
Real-World Impact
Organizations that have adopted Nutanix and Parallels RAS report dramatic results. A recent customer migrated from a legacy approach to Nutanix and Parallels RAS in just a few months - with no formal training required. The outcome:
- Huge performance improvement for remote users
- Simplified administration via one console
- Lower infrastructure costs and predictable scalability
That’s the power of simplicity and choice - turning complex multi-cloud management into an elegant, unified experience.
Beyond VDI: The Future of AI-Enhanced IT
The same Nutanix infrastructure supporting VDI can now power AI-enabled workloads. By combining virtual GPUs (vGPUs) and Parallels RAS delivery, data scientists can securely test, inference and fine-tune models consistently - eliminating the need for a separate AI infrastructure.
This is hybrid agility in action: the ability to serve traditional applications, cloud-native workloads, and emerging AI projects on the same flexible platform.
Conclusion:
Breaking the IT bottleneck means empowering IT to deliver without compromise. With Nutanix and Parallels RAS, organizations gain:
- Faster time-to-value and greater ROI
- Unified management for infrastructure and EUC
- Dynamic, secure workload placement across hybrid environments
- Reduced operational complexity and cost
- Optimized user experience — every day
The modern enterprise demands flexibility. Nutanix and Parallels RAS deliver it - hybrid agility without the drama.
Ready to simplify VDI, strengthen security, and deliver consistent performance across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments? See how Nutanix and Parallels RAS together deliver a powerful, end-to-end solution for modern desktop and application delivery.