Building The New Workplace
Table of Contents
Do you have this problems?!
Before you could continue reading this article, please ask yourself these questions;
- How do you empower your workforce now that they are all sitting at home?
- How do you minimize business disrupton
- How do you enable your workforce to access corporate resource remotely?
- How do you ensure the safety of your corporate data with your workforce 99% at home?
If these are the questions you or your organization is asking, the definition of workplace in the “The New Normal” has become a definition that everyone is trying to figure out what this exactly encompass.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDIs)
Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs): get “PCs” into the hands of your employees as if they are in office, get your remote workforce online in days not months, keep corporate data secured even though data is “exposed” into each of your workforce’s homes. If this resonates with your organization including this short list below:
Centralized management: to have a single pane of glass on all the devices in your organization
Quicker deployment of desktops: to be able to deploy desktops to users who are not in the office
Improved desktop security: to prevent data from being copied or leaked out
Improved business continuity and disaster recovery: that workers can still function and be productive from home
Migrate, upgrade, and patch the OS and applications with less downtime: especially when you do not get to see your users or the laptops/desktops in front of you
If you have all the checkboxes with WHY, then you are ready for HOW and WHAT needs to be considered before you jump on the bandwagon.
Employees to request to work from home
There are 5 groups of users which you will need to take care of before, during and after COVID-19.
- Current remote workers. They used to work remotely thus will require less attention as they would have been given the tools they required.
- Users who never work from home, but have corporate issued laptops. they probably have the right apps installed and meet the security requirements.
- Users who have never work from home (WFH) before, this is the “new” group which you have to decide whether to get them a corporate laptop, or use their own personal laptops.
- Users whose job cannot be done from home. For example, finance, book-keepers, sales operations etc.
- Users who will still come into office or store front. Less for IT/MIS to worry as they are traditionally not users of any IT equipment.
Now you can start considering the technologies that are available to meet the requirements of these personas. Now your ability to manage and troubleshoot user profiles will be a critical element to a good WFH strategy.
Does your organization have an existing virtual application or virtual desktop infrastructure
YES. If your organization has a VDI infrastructure, do you have sufficient licenses to cater additional 50-80% of your workforce having to WFH.
NO. But you can consider leveraging cloud elasticity and cloud burst across multi-cloud options.
User Experience and Expectations
The end user experience needs to be proactively managed and monitored to make sure the projected benefits of VDI result in more productive employees.
For the projects we have implemented, login times to be ½ a minute at a maximum in VDI environments, with 15-20 seconds considered average, and 5 seconds would be considered the holy grail of VDI.
BONUS
Considering VDI?
A good VDI readiness assessment will crawl your network in advance of your VDI project and deliver a report on where your problem areas are before you start. Fill out the form below and we will send you the assessment right away!