The ongoing pandemic is unprecedented. This has opened the pandora’s box for globally thriving economies, and a lot of effort is being put by Governments across the world to contain the spread of COVID-19 virus by both mandating social distancing and ensuring complete lockdown except for the essential services. Since early February, most organizations had already started adopting precautionary measures and implementing the obvious sanitization measures at workplace. However, as the spread intensified, they moved to impose travel restrictions and encouraged work from home in alignment with the Government advisory. Keeping their workforce safe from asymptomatic spread during this time has been the utmost priority for all organizations, and the only way to achieve this is by encouraging their workforce to work from home while keeping their businesses up and running. Organizations will need to adopt a right technology that is sustainable, secure and that supports their workforce need for communication and collaboration while keeping them productive.

Adopting People first approach

Even before the lockdown was declared in India and other geographies, most of our global customers reached out to us discussing their business continuity plans to deal with the situation and keeping their workforce safer. The key concerns for them, in enabling work from home for their workforce, focused on ensuring data security, seamless accessibility to data, enterprise applications availability, and smooth communication and collaboration. As an industry recognized, cloud hosted desktop solution provider, we empowered businesses with a fully managed desktop solution that allowed them to leave the pain of design, implementation, and management to Anunta, while they could focus on core business during these times. Our solution helped them to have cloud hosted work systems up and running in a few days and become scalable in minutes. Since February, many more new organizations have reached out wanting to keep their businesses operational, secure, and productive at the same time. The new customers have added new users across varied use cases to the virtualized environment. We have seen over 50% increase in the addition of new use cases to the cloud desktops environment during the crisis. Our customer support teams have been working tirelessly in enabling both existing and the newly onboarded customers in these challenging times. We thank them for their leadership and extraordinary efforts.

Why Cloud Desktops over VPN

To ensure business continuity, organizations must choose between cloud desktops and/or VPN. With the significant increase in hacking incidents during COVID lockdown, data security is a prime concern for CIOs, while their workforce work from home. Remote workers connecting to corporate networks via VPN have become increasingly vulnerable to targeted virus or malware attacks due to lack of enterprise firewall and security policies. Though VPNs are the lost cost option available, they are not bullet proofs against cyberattacks and are easier to hack in a remote work environment.

Another key area concerning organizations currently is, how to keep their workforce productive? How to provide them the same experience when accessing business applications while they are working from home? The answer to this lies in adoption of cloud hosted desktops. Our cloud desktops come with 24×7 comprehensive helpdesk and single point of accountability for all end-user performance issues. With application brownouts and downtime factored in the solution, end-users have very high application availability and remain productive at all times. We have seen over 90% session logins to the cloud desktop environment across most of our customers during the ongoing time. This is significant as employees adapt to the new work environment and our solution is proving to be the right technology infrastructure to keep them productive with superior user experience. Additionally, the financial year end witnessed a significant increase in the sessions as many of our financial services customers could execute their entire complex cycle of their year-end closing transactions from the comfort of their homes using cloud desktops.

For PCI, HIPPA, HITRUST compliant workloads, cloud hosted desktops are perfect as the possibility of data leaks or theft is eliminated completely. As data cannot be downloaded on endpoints, the risk of data loss is nullified. Further the known vulnerabilities can be patched without disrupting end-user performance.

Empowering work from home users

In the past few weeks, we have successfully rolled out cloud desktops for multiple customers from IT, ITeS, Financial Services, Banking, Manufacturing and Business Process Management verticals. The cloud desktops have addressed the concerns of customers wanting to empower their users with a solution, that is secure, can be deployed quickly, allow collaboration, and make the workforce productive. Anunta’s cloud desktops takes just a few days to set-up and are available on-demand with 24×7 support. New users across use cases can be scaled up in minutes irrespective of their location and can be customized as per the business needs of organizations. While our support teams have been diligently empowering our customers, we have addressed end-user performance associated tickets within defined SLAs.

Approaches to Business Continuity Adoption

1. With Anunta, customers can adopt cloud desktops hosted on any cloud of their choice and be free from the headache of provisioning, configuration, implementation, integration, and management. The built-in disaster recovery with most cloud platforms make them easier to set up new desktops without much investments. Further the centralized management of desktops, makes it easy for IT teams to manage and enhance end-user experience during times of crisis.

2. The pay as you go model of cloud desktops means you pay only for what you consume while allowing users to work from anywhere. Organizations can adopt cloud desktops as a fail-safe backup mechanism to keep their businesses running during an unplanned crisis, such as these. All our customers are now operational as in normal days due to the implementation of cloud desktops.

As most cloud providers experience a significant increase in the demand for cloud based solutions during the pandemic, we see cloud desktops as the most viable solution that can enable customers’ across industry verticals, and of all sizes, to remain operational. We are ensuring that the business infrastructure of our customer organizations remain resilient during these times. With the focus on delivering unparalleled end user experience and ensuring workforce productivity, Anunta is enabling businesses with cloud desktops for business continuity.

Author

Sivakumar Ramamurthy

CEO & Deputy Managing Director, Anunta Tech.