By Elaine Wang, Chief Digital Officer Rectron South Africa
Over the past 19 months, there have been massive changes to traditional working environments, with work from home and hybrid models becoming the norm for organisations of all sizes and industries.
What this shift has required is businesses to recreate the office anywhere online, providing employees with access to company applications and data, in a secure way. Enabling employees to have the flexibility to work from any device and location used to be a headache. However, enterprises are increasingly looking at virtualisation technologies to provide the right answers to some of the issues encountered.
As opposed to a standard desktop infrastructure that stores data and runs applications locally on your machine, virtual desktop infrastructure is a technology that delivers virtual desktops to a variety of devices.
With a virtual desktop system in place, if employees have an internet connection, they can log in to their desktop and they’ll be equipped with any business-critical applications, regardless of their device.
Offering adaptability and scalability
The importance of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is becoming exponentially accelerated as companies look at enabling a more flexible work landscape. The ability to work whenever, however, and wherever remains a need in today’s always-on, hybrid work environments. Having access to these types of tools allows your employees to deliver their best performance, whether they are working from home, the office or a mixture of the two.
VDI provides the accessibility, security, scalability, automation and ease of use to implement quickly and effectively. It is not a transitionary solution, but rather, a permanent one where employees can access their virtual desktop no matter where they are.
Where users are bringing their own endpoint devices into the workplace, fully functioning virtual desktops eliminate the need to integrate apps within the user’s physical device. Instead, employees can quickly access a virtual desktop and enterprise applications without additional configuration.
If an organisation needs to expand temporarily, it can quickly expand its VDI environment. By enabling workers to access an enterprise virtual desktop workload and its respective apps, new employees can be fully functional within minutes.
With a virtual desktop, you can instantly customise memory, storage, and the number of desktop requirements. In addition, you can also provide your employees with desktops designed and customised to align with their job profiles and duties. This makes it easier for them to access the programs they need.
With virtual desktop solutions such as Windows 365, the work experience remains consistent, no matter the device. Employees can pick up right where they left off, because the state of your Cloud PC remains the same, even when devices are switched off. Remote workers can get the same work done on a laptop in a hotel room, a tablet from their car between appointments, or on their desktop while in the office.
Addressing security concerns
As we have seen over the course of the last year with the PoPI Act coming into effect, digital security has become an increasing concern for many organisations, making policy compliance a top priority for South African businesses
With that being said, employees, today must have the right security measures in place, to ensure business data and applications are not at risk. With a virtual desktop solution, security and maintenance are not compromised as the various devices don’t house any of the sensitive data to which employees connect.
The VDI run within virtual machines is stored on a server and delivered over a network. The configuration, security, and overall management of the VDI and virtualised desktop environments and the data are managed centrally. With endpoint security solutions in place, remote workers on either company or personal devices can use a variety of networks and work from their home network to a local coffee shop
With your company data being centrally managed, organisations can keep track of how the information is accessed and what rules should be put in place to protect it. This provides a simple and secure method of accessing a digital workspace that can be scaled and sized to meet their individual needs, while also avoiding the costs of company-owned infrastructure and endpoint hardware.
Remote work has amplified the need to be digitally prepared, innovative and resilient. While the need to enable your remote workforce and deploy the necessary infrastructure can seem daunting, but it doesn’t need to be. VDI is a solution that can turn almost every device into a value adding asset, empowering your employees and ensuring continuity in today’s business environment.
