Supporting business resilience across all workplace policies
With news that several major companies, such as Amazon, are pushing for their employees to return to the office full-time, one might be forgiven for thinking that the hybrid working revolution was just a blunder brought on by the need for a lockdown.
It remains to be seen whether this reversal will be successful or whether it will trigger yet another broader adjustment as workers look for the job that best suits their needs.
It should certainly be seen as part of the continuum of an accelerating process of realignment, as issues of trust, technology, productivity, creativity, family, finances and mental health shape the future of work.
Why hybrid working is still a necessity
Whether hybrid working remains part of an organization’s primary work strategy or not, it is critical that they maintain the ability to do so to ensure business resilience. The disruptions impacting physical office attendance will persist and may increase as the world becomes more unpredictable. From severe weather events to social unrest and global political shifts, there is a plethora of issues that will undermine efforts to confidently predict medium- to long-term plans.
The ability to be flexible when challenges and opportunities arise should be a fundamental consideration for all businesses. Developing an effective remote and hybrid work option allows employees to work from home or other locations if the office becomes inaccessible. If we ignore all the other outcomes of recent years, this is a lesson we should not forget.
Why technology is an important factor for business resilience
Adopting technologies will be critical for companies to achieve the level of business resilience needed to support all operational policies. For example, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) supports remote and hybrid working and can also be used to improve other aspects of business resilience, security, scalability and efficiency.
VDI places PC or workstation resources on a server, rather than on a laptop or desktop device. This allows resources to be co-located with other server-based services in a central location, whether that’s an office server room, a data center, or the cloud. The virtual desktops are accessed with a low-spec device, often a cheap laptop or ‘thin client’, via an application or browser, over the network or the Internet. The end-user experience remains the same as long as the service is properly specified and configured, allowing employees to work from virtually anywhere with an internet connection.
The main benefits of VDI
To ensure better business protection, VDI (and its associated infrastructure) must be located in a high-end data center to ensure additional levels of resiliency. These generally include dual and diverse power supplies and connectivity, backup power generators, high levels of environmental management, and physical and network security (such as DDOS protection). Such measures are important to reduce the risk of downtime, whether your employees work from home or in the office. Public and private cloud providers will generally offer this level of service.
Centralizing all company resources also improves security. Data remains within a centrally managed network and is not localized or replicated across multiple remote devices, exponentially increasing vulnerability to attack. Employees only have cheap, dumb devices in their hands, which are harder to hack and less problematic if stolen or damaged. Reducing the use of VPNs, replication, and edge device data significantly reduces the attack surface.
Many VDI providers also offer organizations scalability, allowing them to scale their resources to meet their current needs. This kind of dynamic resourcing is one of the great promises of cloud computing and is extremely attractive, especially when long-term forecasting is challenging. There are costs associated with such dynamics, but balancing this with cheaper, dedicated core resources enables both reliability and flexibility.
Perhaps the most underrated aspect of VDI is the efficiencies it can introduce to computer room management. Web-based control panel management allows IT administrators to manage everything remotely, regardless of where the end user is located. Virtual desktops can be powered up or powered down in minutes, delivering dramatic savings in the time otherwise spent deploying and decommissioning physical devices. Resources can be reallocated to machines, users can be quickly reassigned, and new images can be deployed quickly, simplifying office moves and reorganizations.
Embracing VDI capabilities for all work policies
There is some understandable nervousness about hybrid working and VDI. For many organizations, this still seems a step too far from their long-established and comfortable working practices and technologies. In addition to the recent push by some organizations to return to office work, there has also been a parallel shift with other early adopters moving away from public cloud services; the latter mainly due to costs and lack of ROI. Fortunately, there are more and more private cloud services that offer better and more accessible offerings, ensuring that the promise of cloud and VDI can still be delivered. This will be important in the coming years, which will undoubtedly be full of new challenges and opportunities.
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