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The Cloud Desktop Adoption Lifecycle: What to Know

By 5 Mins Read
The Cloud Desktop Adoption Lifecycle: What to Know

If you hadn’t heard of cloud desktops before the pandemic, you probably have by now. Cloud desktop services are among the fastest-growing niches within cloud computing, and analysts believe that more and more workers will rely on cloud desktops to do their jobs going forward.

But what will the actual adoption process look like as more organizations embrace cloud desktops? Will it take months or years for most businesses to get cloud desktops fully up and rolling, as it does with many other types of cloud services?

The answer may surprise you. In many ways, the cloud desktop adoption lifecycle is simpler and more flexible than the adoption lifecycle for conventional cloud services. Businesses can move their employees to cloud desktops in days or weeks, not months or years. Just as important, they can scale cloud desktop infrastructure back down almost instantaneously if their needs change.

If your business wants to take advantage of cloud desktops, but you are worried about a slow and complicated adoption process, read on. As this article explains, cloud desktop adoption is much simpler than you may think.

What is the cloud adoption lifecycle?

The cloud adoption lifecycle is a concept that describes the phases organizations go through as they migrate to most types of cloud-based technologies. Those phases include:

  • Evaluation of cloud services.
  • Implementation of a small-scale proof-of-concept.
  • The planning of a broader cloud strategy.
  • Implementation of the broader strategy.
  • Ongoing expansion of cloud environments, including possibly the extension to include other cloud platforms.
  • Cloud maturity, which happens when the organization has fully achieved the benefits it sought from the cloud.


Fig. 1: A representation of the phases in a cloud adoption lifecycle.

Every organization’s cloud adoption path is different, of course, so you should think of the cloud adoption lifecycle as a basic outline of the steps that companies typically take rather than a strict script. Still, it’s a useful concept for thinking through the ways that companies actually go about taking advantage of the cloud once they have set their minds to it.

The adoption lifecycle for cloud desktops

Traditionally, the cloud adoption lifecycle centered around simple cloud computing services, like storage and virtual machines. Companies moving to those technologies generally follow a cloud adoption lifecycle similar to the one described above.

When it comes to cloud desktops, however, the adoption lifecycle can look very different, in two keyways:

  • Speed: Because companies can launch fully managed and professionally supported cloud desktops in a matter of hours, they can complete the adoption lifecycle in days, not months.
  • Flexibility: One of the powerful advantages of cloud desktops is that businesses only need to use them (and, by extension, pay for them) when they need them. They can scale up or down, vertically, or horizontally, with ease. This is not so much the case with other types of cloud services, where it’s hard to move VMs back on-prem, for instance.

Both of these features mean that companies can quickly adopt cloud desktops when they need to scale their desktop infrastructure quickly — as many did during the Covid-19 crisis, for example — without the long planning and proof-of-concept phases that form part of the conventional cloud adoption lifecycle.

Crisis and cloud desktop adoption

Indeed, part of the reason cloud desktops are currently experiencing explosive growth is that their easy adoption cycle makes them an ideal solution for companies struggling to maintain continuity in difficult times.

The Covid pandemic is one obvious example of a situation in which rapid cloud desktop adoption enabled companies to cope with the situation by extending their desktop infrastructure very quickly to support a remote workforce. Not only did cloud desktops allow businesses to keep their employees productive when they could no longer work on-site, but cloud desktop services also ensured the security of business data and applications. Rather than asking employees to work from personal devices that are difficult to secure, businesses were able to turn to cloud desktop platforms that are centrally monitored and managed to ensure security.

Beyond Covid, cloud desktops are also a safeguard against more mundane disruptions, such as data center failure that could be caused by monsoons or other extreme weather events. When desktops run in a public cloud like Azure, they can be hosted in data centers located anywhere in the world. If one region — like northwest India, for example — is impacted by severe weather, cloud desktops can be moved almost instantaneously to a different data center that exists in a separate cloud region to protect business continuity.

Businesses may choose to gain even greater levels of continuity by taking a multi cloud approach to cloud desktops. A company could choose to leverage cloud desktops from both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure or any public cloud platform, for instance, in order to maintain desktop availability in the event that one of those providers experiences a disruption.

Rapid adoption with minimal investment

Adding to the agility of cloud desktop adoption is the fact that cloud desktop services like Anunta’s Cloud Desktops are priced using a pay-as-you-go model. This means companies pay only for the desktops they need, when they need them. There is no fixed term or upfront investment required.

Thus, for businesses that want the option of scaling their desktop infrastructure up rapidly, when necessary, but don’t want to tie up enormous capital to guarantee that scalability, cloud desktops offer a compelling solution.

Conclusion: Why cloud desktops are here to stay

It’s easy to see how the easy and flexible adoption process described above makes cloud desktops an obvious choice for businesses seeking to navigate the ongoing uncertainty that they face at present.

By making it possible to scale desktop infrastructure up with the flip of a virtual switch, while at the same time avoiding major capital investments or long-term contracts, cloud desktop solutions such as Anunta’s Cloud Desktops offer a fresh take on the meaning of cloud adoption.

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In BFSI

Azure Virtual Desktop for Financial Services

By 4 Mins Read
Azure Virtual Desktop for Financial Services

For companies in the financial services industry, taking advantage of cloud desktops has not typically been easy. Although a variety of cloud desktop and Desktop-as-a-Service solutions are available from vendors like VMware, Citrix and Amazon, most don’t deliver the compliance and security benefits that financial services companies often require.

Yet there is one cloud desktop platform that addresses this challenge: Azure Virtual Desktop, or AVD. Delivered as a hosted service in the Azure cloud, AVD, which debuted in 2019, is one of the newest offerings in the Desktop-as-a-Service market. It’s also a solution that provides the security and compliance features that are often missing from other cloud desktop services.

What financial services companies need in cloud desktops

For the financial services industry, replacing expensive, hard-to-maintain physical desktops with cloud-based alternatives has not always been an obvious proposition due primarily to the fact that cloud desktops required businesses to move sensitive desktop workloads into the cloud. In turn, they made it difficult to meet regulatory compliance requirements and high security standards.

In other words, it can be difficult to run applications that interact with customers’ personal financial data on cloud-based desktops because doing so means moving the data to remote environments that your company no longer controls. Some cloud desktops are also harder to isolate from Internet-borne attacks because the services that host them can’t be securely protected behind a firewall, due to the design of cloud networking configurations.

In order to address these challenges, then, businesses in the financial services sector need cloud desktops that allow them to meet regulatory rules regarding data security and compliance, while also maintaining the same standards of desktop security that on-premises workstations provide.

AVD’s compliance and security model

AVD was designed from the start to address these requirements.

Cloud desktops stay behind the firewall

When you host cloud desktops in Azure Virtual Desktop, desktop instances and applications are securely segmented from the public Internet by Azure Firewall. This means that security vulnerabilities that may exist within desktop environments (such as unpatched applications or insecure open ports) cannot be discovered and exploited by attackers on the Internet.

Physical security

In fact, cloud desktops running on AVD are in one respect even more secure than on-premises workstations because in addition to being protected against attacks that originate on the Internet, they are also physically secured.

With a service like AVD, you don’t need to worry about malicious parties gaining unauthorized physical access to your desktops, as you would with traditional workstations that are hosted in office buildings or other locations that may not be as secure as you need.

Compliant by default

On top of this, because the Microsoft Azure cloud has achieved more than 90 compliance certifications with regulatory agencies spread across the globe, its cloud services very likely meet whichever compliance rules your business faces without extra effort on your part.

Put another way, AVD is compliant by default with most regulatory rules that impact financial services and other industries.

Data sovereignty controls

Relatedly, if you need to keep data in a specific geographic region in order to meet data sovereignty requirements, AVD makes it easy to do so by allowing you to choose which cloud region hosts your data. This flexibility enables companies to minimize their compliance exposures by restricting data storage to certain jurisdictions.

Minimal third-party exposure

Finally, because Azure Virtual Desktop is an all-in-one cloud desktop platform that runs entirely in the Azure cloud, it doesn’t depend on integrations with third-party tools or services that could lead to unnecessary data or compliance exposure. From configuring firewall rules to adding new users, everything that you need to do in a AVD environment can be achieved from within Azure itself.

Getting started with AVD

Perhaps the only major drawback of Azure Virtual Desktop is that it’s a complex solution that can be difficult for IT departments to implement and manage if they lack extensive experience with Microsoft tooling and the Azure cloud.

That’s why companies across the globe have turned to Anunta to help them transition from traditional desktops to cloud desktops running on AVD. Although AVD has been available for under two years, Anunta has already deployed AVD-based desktops for tens of thousands of users. Anunta’s AVD experts not only know what it takes to manage AVD, but can also provide guidance to smooth the transition of workloads from physical desktops to cloud desktops and make recommendations to ensure the most secure, cost-effective and reliable desktop experience possible. Contact Anunta to learn more.

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In DaaS

Azure Virtual Desktop: The Cloud Desktop Solution IT Teams Have Been Waiting For

By 4 Mins Read
Azure Virtual Desktop: The Cloud Desktop Solution IT Teams Have Been Waiting For

IT teams face enormous pressure to modernize their environments, go “cloud native” and embrace “digital transformation.”

Yet doing these things hasn’t always been easy. Your team may be able to move certain applications and data to the cloud easily enough. But it has traditionally been much harder to modernize legacy systems, like desktop computers, that have been in place for decades. Finding a way to move those systems to the cloud without breaking the bank, introducing new security problems or increasing your management burden is a real challenge.

AVD

Or at least, it has been a challenge, given that conventional platforms for hosting desktops in the cloud haven’t always been easy to optimize for cost, security and manageability.

That changed with the introduction in 2019 of Azure Virtual Desktop, or AVD, Microsoft’s Desktop-as-a-Service platform hosted in the Azure cloud. For the first time, AVD provides a cloud desktop solution that allows enterprise IT teams to square the circle between legacy infrastructure and cloud-native technology.

Here are five reasons why AVD is the desktop solution enterprise IT teams have been missing for years.

1. Cost-effective cloud desktops

Azure Virtual Desktops features simple, predictable pricing. Unlike most other Desktop-as-a-Service platforms, AVD charges just for the Azure resources that your AVD virtual machines consume. You don’t pay extra for orchestration layers or tooling.

Thanks in part to these savings, the total cost of a AVD-based desktop is about 90 percent lower than that of a conventional, physical desktop, according to research conducted by Anunta. That’s a fact that anyone responsible for enterprise IT budgeting can love.

On top of this, AVD offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, meaning you don’t have to make upfront capital investments or commit to long-term fixed spending. IT budgeters will love that, too.

Cost-effective cloud desktops

2. Support for graphical workloads

A chief limitation of many conventional cloud desktop services is that they let you run only basic applications that depend on standard virtualized hardware.

AVD goes further. It supports GPU acceleration, making it possible to run specialized applications that don’t work on a conventional virtual machine. This is an especially important advantage for IT teams that need to support users in industries like engineering and manufacturing, where GPU-accelerated applications are sometimes a necessity.

GPU Powered VMs

3. Multi-tenant Windows 10

Azure Virtual Desktop is the only cloud desktop platform that allows for multi-tenant use of Windows 10. That means multiple users within your organization can share the same cloud desktop.

Multi-tenant desktops drastically reduce total costs while also making desktops easier to manage. If multiple users can share each desktop, you have fewer total desktops to pay for and maintain.

FSLogix Architecture diagram

4. Scalability

Azure Virtual Desktop is built from the ground up to be highly scalable. Not only can you add more virtual machines whenever you need to increase your number of cloud desktops, but you can also easily provision additional users directly from within Azure.

With AVD in place, IT departments no longer have to relive the struggles they faced to scale up their desktop infrastructure during the Covid-19 pandemic. You can quickly increase (or, just as important, decrease) capacity whenever you need.

Scaling Automation

5. Built-in licensing and compliance

Azure Virtual Desktop also simplifies cloud desktop management and deployment by offering built-in software licensing and compliance certifications. You don’t need to obtain and manage your own Windows licenses, and the Azure cloud’s broad set of compliance certifications ensure that your desktops comply with whichever regulatory laws are in effect in your jurisdiction.

Azure compliance documentation

Conclusion: No more excuses for on-premises desktops

In the past, it was easy to draw the conclusion that cloud desktops were too expensive, too difficult to manage or too complicated to be a practical desktop infrastructure solution for most users.

AVD has changed that. Today, there are few scenarios where it doesn’t make sense to take advantage of the cost-efficiency, scalable and manageability of cloud desktops.

When you’re ready to make the move to AVD, Anunta can help. Drawing on its experience setting up AVD-based cloud desktops for tens of thousands of users to date, the Anunta team offers the deep expertise necessary to plan and implement a AVD migration tailored to the needs of your business. Contact us to learn more.

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In Cloud

3 Factors to Consider When Moving to the Cloud

By 5 Mins Read
3 Factors to Consider When Moving to the Cloud

Change is difficult for everyone, and enterprise computing is no different. The degree of difficulty can be minimized based on the strategic approach and project plan, as well as maximizing end-user acceptance.

But first, what exactly is a cloud desktop? A cloud desktop, which is commonly referred to as Desktop as a Service (DaaS), presents a full operating system workstation and applications as hosted externally by a cloud infrastructure. The user device is largely irrelevant and can be a tablet, desktop computer, laptop, or even a smartphone.

Strategic Approach to Cloud Desktops

Enterprises that successfully adopt cloud desktops incorporate solid justifications; lack of clear goals or simply joining a technical wave are not good enough reasons. Common drivers for initiating this type of transition are based on cost savings, offloading IT services, lack of availability of qualified IT personnel, data center hardware maintenance, licensing intricacies, application integration issues, and other complexities. Typically, cloud desktops are considered for not just one reason but instead multiple business and technical requirements.

The size of the enterprise bears weight as well. Small businesses are more likely to be plagued with most if not all of the above drivers and thus have a more immediate need to make a strategic change in short order. Small businesses must be flexible and agile, and strategy is often determined by the business owner or a few members of management. Although cloud desktops can positively benefit large companies as well, these larger entities often have IT staff, expertise, and equipment and thus spend more time defining strategic direction and facilitating change.

Selecting a partner that aligns with your strategic approach is an important success criterion. Querying the partner about the number of years in business, the number of virtual desktops supported, how little or how much technical support is provided to users, service level agreements, customer administrative interface and expectations, as well as testimonials will weigh into the decision. In addition, a trial period will provide a realistic demonstration of potential partner capabilities and services.

Planning for Success

The adage, “failure to plan is planning to fail,” is certainly true when it comes to cloud desktop implementations. The project plan should include clearly defined goals. In addition, key aspects of the project plan include testing “what if?” scenarios, application integration, databases/file storage and repositories, and network connectivity, as well as the actual transition process.

In addition, the actual cutover may require consulting, technical, and/or training assistance, depending on the complexity of the current computer environment. For example, if the new virtual cloud desktop environment will be based solely on Microsoft Office applications, even including Dynamics CRM, Visio, SharePoint, or other add-ons, these can easily be incorporated into the cloud. However, more complex client/server applications including backend resources will necessitate additional time, integration effort, and storage requirements that should be incorporated into the project plan.

User Acceptance and Transition

Ensuring that users are content with a new computer model, as well as a satisfactory transition, are the most critical keys to success. If users do not fully embrace the new computing system, achievement of project goals and work effort may be compromised.

If users are complaining about slow computers, application response times, the time necessary to upgrade anti-virus software and the like, they will probably be receptive to a new system that addresses these items. But keeping in mind that a percentage of users are resistant to change no matter the benefit, it is important that communications regarding upcoming changes are clear and concise.

Engaging some users in a pilot is an excellent way to minimize resistance to new cloud desktops. These early adopters should be composed of individuals from various departments and work titles, and they should be encouraged to share their experiences with their co-workers. As a result, their co-workers will build up excitement for the upcoming change and be receptive to it.

User training helps drive adoption. Whether that training is formal or consists of a few short videos, these tools help by addressing questions and potential issues before they alienate new users. Access to Q & A materials will serve as reference materials.

Some users may be fearful that their jobs or their co-workers’ jobs will be eliminated due to adoption of cloud computing and thus express resistance. If this is the case, a straightforward announcement should be made to dispel grapevine rumors.

A few users will be hesitant to give up their beloved computers for their day-to-day work. Users that are accustomed to accessing local files or other data stored on the local hard drive may feel that they are losing an element of control in the workplace and that the cloud is monitoring every computing activity. These concerns should be acknowledged, and users should be encouraged to appreciate the centralization and advanced computing capabilities that cloud desktops offer.

The transition process and timeline should likewise be communicated clearly to users, including dates, events, and activities. If a weekend cutover takes place, a few users should be involved with testing to ensure full functionality on Monday morning.

Conclusion

As you consider transitioning to cloud desktops, a robust strategic approach, project plan, and user acceptance engagement are keys to maximizing success. User acceptance can be the most complex aspect of a cloud desktop rollout, and achieving user adoption goals is contingent upon involvement and clear communications.

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In Cloud

4 Reasons Why Cloud Desktops Matter in 2021

By 4 Mins Read
4 Reasons Why Cloud Desktops Matter in 2021

Many folks declared 2020 the year of the cloud desktop, due in no small part to the onset of the pandemic and the pressure it placed on businesses to implement more flexible IT systems.

But even with 2020 having come and gone, there remains plenty of reason to believe that cloud desktops will remain critical for the foreseeable future. The pandemic may finally (hopefully) be ending, but the benefits offered by cloud desktops will remain very relevant in a post-Covid world.

With that reality in mind, here’s a look at four reasons why cloud desktops continue to be a valuable solution in 2021.

1. Ongoing remote work

The slowing down of the pandemic means that more workers have the option to return to their offices. But many won’t, at least not on a full-time basis. Remote work is here to stay, according to most analysts.

Indeed, a survey by the National Association for Business Economics found that only 11 percent of businesses expect all of their employees to return to pre-pandemic work arrangements in the near future.

For businesses, then, providing desktop environments that can be accessed from anywhere and at any time — as cloud desktops can — remains a priority in 2021 and beyond. The pre-pandemic world, in which most employees spent all of their working hours at their on-site workstations, is not coming back.

2. Increasing compliance challenges

The regulatory compliance landscape is growing more and more challenging by the year. As new compliance laws come online — such as Brazil’s LGPD, which took effect in late 2020, and California’s CPRA, which goes live in 2023 — businesses face new requirements surrounding data security and privacy.

At the same time, enforcement of existing regulations is intensifying. GDPR fines increased by 40 percent in 2020, for example, a trend that is likely to continue for some time.

For businesses, increased regulatory challenges mean that protecting private data is becoming more and more important. Cloud desktops help to meet these challenges by eliminating risks associated with physical device insecurity. They also make it easier to centralize data in the cloud, where it can be secured in a more consistent and standardized way than if it were spread across sprawling on-premises workstations. And they provide greater control over data sovereignty: With cloud desktops, you can store data in one region while making accessible to employees in another, a feat that can’t be achieved using traditional desktops and local storage.

3. Growing IT costs

The overall costs of IT resources continue to rise. Gartner forecasts a 6.2 percent increase in IT spending in 2021, which comes on top of the investments businesses made in 2020 to respond to the pandemic.

As IT spending continues to spiral, businesses must work harder to ensure they can control costs and maximize return on investment. Cloud desktops, which can be deployed with no capital expenditures and can be turned off when they are no longer needed, offer critical cost advantages in this respect. They also provide organizations with desktop environments that can be used indefinitely, with no maintenance costs. In contrast, physical workstations typically last only a bit longer than five years, and they require constant maintenance.

For businesses seeking to keep IT costs in check, then, and to ensure that they reap a full return on their IT investments, cloud desktops offer a clear advantage.

4. Everything else is in the cloud

More than four-fifths of organizations already host the majority of their workloads in the cloud. That’s a trend that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

For businesses that host virtually everything else in the cloud, it only makes sense to move desktop environments to the cloud as well. Doing so ensures that desktops don’t undercut the organization’s ability to take full advantage of the agility that the cloud enables.

In other words, when your desktop infrastructure is as scalable, flexible and cost-effective as the rest of your cloud-based workloads, your business can live fully in the age of the cloud, without traditional workstations dragging you down.

Conclusion: Cloud desktops are here to stay
Even as we look forward to a post-pandemic world, the trends that made cloud desktops an obvious answer to the challenges businesses faced last year are not going away. The need to enable anytime, anywhere work, meet tight compliance and security requirements, optimize IT spending and take full advantage of the cloud all mean that cloud desktops remain a powerful solution for 2021 and beyond.

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In Desktop virtualization

Windows Virtual Desktops vs Horizon vs Citrix

By 5 Mins Read
Comparing Cloud Desktops Windows Virtual Desktops vs. Horizon vs. Citrix.png

Comparing Cloud Desktops: Windows Virtual Desktops vs. Horizon vs. Citrix

One of the great things about the cloud desktop market is that there are a number of offerings to choose from, each with different strengths and weaknesses.

But having so much choice can also be a challenge. If you are new to the world of cloud desktops, you may be unsure which solution is the best for your needs.

This article provides guidance by comparing the pros and cons of three leading cloud desktop platforms: Windows Virtual Desktop, VMware Horizon Desktop and Citrix Cloud Desktops.

What is a cloud desktop?

Before diving into the similarities and differences between these solutions, let’s define what a cloud desktop is.

A cloud desktop is a virtual machine that runs in the cloud and hosts a desktop environment. Users can connect to the environment remotely, meaning that their desktop applications and data are accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection.

Cloud desktops are similar to but different from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI. VDI platforms host virtual desktop sessions on local servers rather than in the cloud. VDI provides many of the same benefits as cloud desktops, and in some ways, VDI can be more secure and cost-effective. However, because cloud desktops centralize desktop environments in highly available public clouds, they offer maximum flexibility and reliability.

Comparing cloud desktop platforms

Windows Virtual Desktop, VMware Horizon Desktop and Citrix Cloud Desktops all offer the same basic functionality: The ability to host desktop environments in the cloud. They also all support application virtualization, which means they can stream individual apps instead of full desktop environments from the cloud if desired.

However, the three platforms differ in nuanced but important ways.

Operating system support

Windows Virtual Desktop, as its name suggests, supports virtualization only for Windows –specifically, Windows 7, Windows 10, and Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016, 2019.

VMware Horizon and Citrix Cloud Desktops are more flexible. They can host Linux-based desktop environments as well as Windows. Of course, given that the vast majority of businesses use Windows desktops, this difference is likely not important for many use cases.

Cloud hosting options

When it comes to which cloud will host your desktops, VMware Horizon is the most flexible option. It can run on any major public cloud.

In contrast, Citrix Cloud Desktops and Windows Virtual Desktop are hosted in the Azure cloud. (Citrix’s other VDI solutions can be deployed on other public clouds, but its fully managed cloud desktop solution runs in Azure.)

Single vs. multiple sessions

Currently, Windows Virtual Desktop boasts support for multiple sessions. That means multiple users can share the same virtual desktop at the same time, with each user operating in a secure, isolated session. This flexibility can reduce the total number of cloud desktops that an organization needs to deploy.

Horizon and Citrix Cloud Desktops don’t offer this option. On their platforms, only one user can be connected to each virtual machine at a time. (Multiple users can share a virtual machine, but they can’t use it concurrently.)

VDI compatibility

Windows Virtual Desktop was designed from the beginning to function only as a cloud desktop platform. Although Microsoft offers separate VDI solutions that can be deployed on-premises, they are not closely related to Windows Virtual Desktop, and you can’t easily migrate from Windows Virtual Desktop to Microsoft VDI platform.

That makes Windows Virtual Desktop different from Horizon and Citrix Cloud Desktops, both of which are based on VDI frameworks that their respective vendors offered prior to going into the cloud desktop market.

This means that Horizon and Citrix Cloud Desktops may be a better choice for organizations that want the flexibility of moving some of their desktop virtualization environment on-premises, now or in the future. They can do so without having to move to a totally new platform.

Maturity

Windows Virtual Desktop, which debuted in September 2018, is the newest cloud desktop offering that we’re comparing in this article. VMware Horizon traces its roots to 2006 (although the product has evolved significantly since then), and Citrix has been offering cloud desktops since 2015 (and has been doing VDI for longer than that). From this perspective, VMware and Citrix’s offerings are more established

This isn’t to say that Windows Virtual Desktop is less reliable. It’s a production-ready, enterprise-grade product. But it is a newer solution, and it arguably still feels a little rougher around the edges than the other platforms.

On the other hand, Windows Virtual Desktop offers the advantage of having been built from the start for the cloud, rather than being born as a VDI solution that was extended into the cloud. It can feel more modern in that respect.

Conclusion: Which cloud desktop service to use when

In sum, Windows Virtual Desktop makes sense if you want to benefit from multi-session support and you want a cloud desktop platform that is well integrated into the Azure cloud.

Meanwhile, the major advantages of VMware Horizon and Citrix Cloud Desktops are that they are in many ways more flexible with regard to how they are hosted and which types of operating systems you can run.

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In Remote Working

Top Remote Working Trends in 2021

By 9 Mins Read
Remote Working Trends in 2021

Remote work is no longer the temporary arrangement that many people expected it to be when the pandemic began. It’s here to stay for the foreseeable future, and companies must adapt by embracing remote work trends that will keep their workers productive and happy — whether they are in the office working on remote desktops part of the time or not at all.

With that need in mind, here’s a list of the top remote-work trends for 2021 that companies should consider as they prepare for a future in which significant numbers of employees work remotely on a permanent basis.

Optimizing the remote-employee experience

When remote work seemed like a temporary arrangement, most companies put relatively little thought into the employee experience, meaning how employees thought and felt about working from home.

They didn’t invest in collaboration technologies, such as remote desktops, that would help employees feel connected to the rest of the organization while working in isolation. Nor did most companies deploy tools that provide a frustration-free experience for connecting to IT resources from out of the office. At best, they gave their employees software like a Windows RDP client so they could log into their company workstations from home.

As it has become clear that many employees will be working remotely for the foreseeable future, companies have begun investing more heavily in activities like virtual coffee breaks, which can help employees collaborate and engage with each other. They have also implemented more user-friendly technologies, such as cloud remote desktop servers, which make it easier for employees to access the applications and data they need to do their jobs, no matter where they are located.

Securing remote IT assets

A number of new security challenges emerge when workers are connecting remotely on Windows Remote Desktops. Networks become more difficult to secure because they need to support users and devices connecting from beyond the firewall. Data is at higher risk of being downloaded by employees to local devices that are not physically secure. Even phishing emails can be harder to detect.

Indeed, according to one study, 20 percent of organizations have suffered a security breach since the start of the pandemic that was facilitated by remote workers.

This means that, going forward, it will become critical to secure the remote desktop infrastructure and software that employees use to work remotely. Centralizing desktop environments in the cloud is one way to do this. When workstations run virtually inside secure cloud environments, data and applications never have to leave the cloud, which significantly reduces exposure to potential attack.

Supporting peripheral devices

When employees work remotely temporarily, being able to connect their company-owned IT environments to devices like printers and scanners is not usually a top priority. They can wait until they’re back in the office to print documents. Or they can print a few on their personal equipment at home.

But when employees work remotely regularly, these ad hoc approaches don’t work. Workers need a seamless way to integrate devices in their at-home work environment with in-office servers, file shares and other resources their company owns.

This can be done, but it requires solutions tailored-made for this purpose. As companies prepare to support remote workers permanently, factoring in the need to integrate with peripheral devices will be a priority.

Maintaining IT hardware

Keeping IT hardware up and running also becomes more challenging when remote work is permanent. Employees may be able to get by with laptops that need maintenance when they’re working from home temporarily. But when they rarely or never go into the office, providing support for physical hardware is much more difficult.

One way to cope with this challenge is to minimize the amount of physical hardware that companies need to maintain. Here again, cloud desktops can help by allowing organizations to provide employees with a complete remote desktop environment that they can access from anywhere using their own hardware. And because the only resource required to log into the cloud desktop is a Web browser, there is no special hardware or software that the company needs to deploy and maintain on employees’ personal devices to keep them productive.

Keeping costs in check

The cost of supplying remote workers with the equipment they need to work effectively from anywhere can rise quickly, especially if companies try to recreate the IT infrastructure of the office within each employee’s home. When they do that, employees sometimes require high-powered desktops or laptops, routers and perhaps even UPS units to keep their devices running.

A simpler — and less costly — approach is to host desktop environments in the cloud, which don’t fail when the power goes off or the router goes down, and which can be configured to provide whichever resource allocations employees need. When employees are assigned cloud desktops, they can access their workstations from any location and device, without depending on special (or expensive) equipment.

Facts about Remote Working

Here are some interesting facts about remote working:

Workplace autonomy is highly preferable among job seekers

For some employees, working remotely and sharing files via remote desktops has been a blessing in disguise. In fact, a study reveals that workplace flexibility is the primary reason behind employees accepting new jobs.

Therefore, businesses must remember that when candidates decide between job offers with similar payrolls, the scales tilt more toward the one that allows for flexible working.

Remote working benefits the ecology

Logging into windows desktop servers to collaborate with colleagues can lead to significant environmental sustainability gains. Remote working remarkably shrinks the need for a regular commute as employees can simply work on projects through remote desktops. For instance, home working four days/week could trim nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions by about a tenth.

The love for remote working will continue

Remote working has become the new normal, and as things settle down, employees have built new habits and preferences. Not only is “work from anywhere” popular, but several employees want to remain location independent for most of the work week.

About 9 out of 10 employees opt for accessing remote desktop servers from their homes, opines a survey. Of them, 45% prefer functioning in a fully remote work setting, while a slightly lesser percentage choose the hybrid work model.

Conclusion: Keeping remote employees productive and happy

If 2020 introduced many employees to remote work for the first time, 2021 is the year when companies realized that remote work would continue indefinitely for many of their employees. To thrive in this environment, organizations must provide employees with the tools they need to work efficiently from anywhere, while also addressing the security and cost challenges associated with remote work.

FAQS

What are the most in-demand remote jobs?

These remote jobs will see drastic demand in 2022 and beyond:

  • Digital marketer: Build brand awareness and generate leads using organizations’ websites and social media platforms
  • Web/software developer: Plan and develop device- and browser-friendly websites and applications
  • Data scientist: Extract meaningful insights from data using advanced analytics methods, including predictive modeling and machine learning (ML), and help enhance decision-making
  • UX designer: Make products or services that fulfill businesses’ needs and boost overall user experience
  • Cybersecurity analyst: Safeguard mission-critical resources, such as data, systems, and servers, from malicious online attacks

What is the trend of working from home?

When COVID-19 prompted sudden workplace shutdowns, organizations slipped into the spontaneous experiment of working from home. Cut to the present, companies have established new working protocols that acknowledge flexible work as a lingering aspect of the modern working realm instead of a temporary pandemic response.

Offering employees the option to work from home helps businesses achieve economies of scale. Inflation reaching new highs means a gradual rise in the cost of goods and services. Hence, encouraging location-neutral workforces is a win-win for both employers and employees.

Further, remote work helps companies looking to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) achieve a truly diverse and global workforce.

Which field has the most remote jobs?

At present, technology-related companies are offering the highest number of remote working opportunities. Tech workforces already had the infrastructure and skills to switch to remote work when COVID-19 struck worldwide. Moreover, ongoing advances in remote desktop as a service (DaaS) are encouraging companies to connect to their employees, no matter where they are.

Within the technology industry, cloud engineers, database architects, and salesforce developers represent a major portion of the remote workforce. Eliminating geographical curbs on human capital – and thus optimizing its productivity – will help organizations capture the value at stake.

The healthcare and education sectors also are catching up when it comes to expanding remote workforces.

Is remote working the future of work?

Remote working is an incredible option if companies allow it; however, it does not necessarily suit everybody. The pandemic-spurred work protocol poses two oft-cited concerns questioning its effectiveness. First is the lack of the close-knit environment that traditional workplaces offer. The other is the potential productivity slump as employees have to juggle distractions throughout the working hours.

Given these reasons, several C-level executives reckon that returning to office cubicles makes employees more efficient, eliminates communication loopholes, and promotes a more positive work setting.

As businesses unfold the future of work, the answer lies in hybrid work, where employees can live across regions but participate in face-to-face activities on a semi-normal basis.

What is the highest-paying remote job?

Software engineers/developers mint the most money while working remotely. They are responsible for building applications, websites, and software for businesses’ specific use cases. With proficiency in programming languages like JavaScript, Ruby, and Python, Software engineers keep pace with the evolving demands of the flourishing tech industry by building the front and back ends of the user experience online.

Product managers follow software engineers in terms of highest-paying remote jobs. The primary credit for their high demand goes to the rise in multiple digital product and project development journeys. In addition, product managers manage the entire development workflow: building strategies, creating blueprints, and researching the markets.

Can remote working replace offices?

Remote working, no doubt, brings scads of benefits with them. As people access their smartphones, tablets, and laptops, they can collaborate with their colleagues through video-conferencing tools and complete their work from home itself.

Earlier, even for brief catch-ups or menial tasks which are doable on any Internet-enabled device, people had to travel to their workplaces. However, with better technology at their disposal, including cloud desktop services, they have the luxury to complete tasks from home.

Nevertheless, remote working cannot replace traditional offices. The emerging work culture gels well only with industries, including technology, marketing, and human resources. On the other side, in jobs where doing field work and networking with others is essential – government, real estate, and automobile – remote working can never replace physical offices.

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In Cloud

Hybrid Cloud vs. Multi-Cloud: What’s the Difference?

By 5 Mins Read
Hybrid Cloud vs. Multi-Cloud: What’s the Difference?

Hybrid Cloud vs Multi Cloud

Going forward, CIOs are no longer facing the question as to whether or not to incorporate cloud into the IT strategy, but rather, “How much cloud?” The key options are hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, and each has a multitude of pros and cons.

What is Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud is a deployment based on two distinct cloud types, usually private cloud, and public cloud. This typically signifies a private data center that works in conjunction with a public cloud service, such as Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Oftentimes, the private data center serves as the principal site that serves production users, and the cloud environment service supports burst capacity requirements and/or disaster recovery. This approach is often the first adoption phase for any type of cloud technologies, and in some instances, it becomes the permanent approach.

Key Advantages of Hybrid Cloud

A key advantage of hybrid cloud relates to operational efficiencies. When marketing initiates a sales blitz or seasonal peaks occur, the chosen public cloud platform is invoked only when the private data center cannot support user load or is unavailable. Although uncommitted public cloud pricing carries the highest per-unit cost, these resources are only consumed temporarily and enabled, as necessary.

Because the public cloud component of hybrid cloud is an add-on service, disruption to the existing IT infrastructure is minimal. As a result, the IT staff continues to maintain and manage the existing environment as a well-known entity, and cloud services are appended. Thus, the learning cycle for the IT staff is gradual.

What is Multi-Cloud

Multi-cloud signifies implementations wherein in two or more cloud providers of the same type that are used collectively to provide the total solution. Because cloud services differ in offerings and cost, the “mix and match” approach enables enterprises to deploy the most appropriate and cost-effective components from each cloud provider.

Key Advantages of Multi-Cloud

A key advantage of multi-cloud is the efficiency of resources without dependency on a private data center. If one cloud provider can more efficiently address large database resources while another can more effectively address virtual desktop workloads, the two can be married to address the full spectrum of IT requirements, often at a better price.

Global entities can likewise from a multi-cloud approach because public cloud vendors may uniquely have a local presence in smaller countries. For example, if tasked with providing the best user experience for an upcoming acquisition in Stockholm, Sweden, AWS would represent the best choice because the other major providers do not locally support Sweden. But if that new acquisition were based in Santiago, Chile, Azure and GCP have announced service from that location.

However, network connectivity and security must be impeccably configured to ensure that these types of issues do not negate the benefits of multi-cloud. In addition, administrators must be completely up to date with knowledge of the services of each cloud provider because there could be an unexpected downstream impact due to a modification on the part of any single provider.

A distinct advantage of multi-cloud is reduced lock-in to each cloud vendor, as well as redundancy. However, architecting and moving cloud systems to support complex modifications requires well-trained IT personnel when resources are shifted.

Which cloud is right for your organization?

Because every IT organization is different, there is no simple answer as to whether hybrid cloud or multi-cloud is most suitable for your environment. By reviewing your own unique environment in detail, as well as future requirements, the answer will become clear.

The first step in making this decision is dependent upon taking a hard look at IT requirements. A small IT organization may consist of a few people that handle multi-faceted requirements that range from cabling the data center to integrating complex business applications. Especially where system upgrades are burdensome and current resources are at the tipping point, relieving the physical data center work effort and porting the compute requirements to a multi-cloud strategy focused on two public clouds would likely provide the functionality and redundancy needed to optimize IT operations.

Large enterprises have significantly more systems in place and any type of transition moves at a slow pace due to the number of people, resources, and processes in place. These organizations often have a significant investment in physical disaster recovery sites that maintain parallel resources, and an immediate cost savings can be realized by adopting a hybrid cloud strategy for DR. While a multi-cloud strategy may or may not be undertaken for the long term, there will be an immediate win associated with adopting a hybrid cloud strategy.

Cost factors into the total solution significantly. Cloud adoption estimates are frequently underestimated in terms of consulting resources and ongoing compute requirements. Be sure to query partners in depth regarding estimates and engage in conversation with technical community resources that have made a transition similar to your project plan to understand any unplanned costs and delays that were encountered.

Way forward

In 2021, adopting cloud is no longer a question of “if,” but instead, “when.” Hybrid cloud–as commonly represented by a private cloud and a public cloud for DR and burst requirements–is often undertaken as the first step in cloud adoption. Some enterprises then move forward with a multi-cloud strategy, typically based on two or more public cloud providers, to offload all compute requirements. Which is best for your enterprise depends largely on the size and complexity of your organization and system resources, as well as the cost.

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In VDI

VDI – What is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure?

By 11 Mins Read
What is Virtual desktop Infrastructure

Table of contents

VDI – What is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure?

VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is a technology that is used to host desktop environments on a centralized server on-premises or on the cloud. These virtual machines are then deployed to end-users as and when they request them. Users, in turn, can access these virtual machines remotely. Virtual desktops that are hosted on virtual machines are managed and controlled via management software. Now that you know what a VDI is, read on to understand how it works and what its benefits are.

Why Do You Need Virtual Desktop Infrastructure?

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure offers organizations a number of advantages such as ease of access to enterprise applications, user mobility, greater security, and flexibility. While in the past the technology was expensive and quite challenging to deploy, the increasing number of businesses adopting hyperconverged infrastructure has allowed for VDI to be deployed at a lower cost, while also offering scalability.

How Does VDI work?

In all deployments of the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, the following parameters are followed:

  • Virtual desktops exist within virtual machines (VMs) on a centralized, remote server
  • The virtual desktop offers an operating system like Microsoft Windows
  • VMs are essentially host-based, which means multiple instances can be housed on one server within the same data center
  • End users are required to be connected to the centrally managed server for continued access to the virtual desktop
  • The connection broker manages to find a virtual desktop for every client to connect to, upon them successfully accessing the VDI environment
  • The hypervisor runs, creates, and manages VMs that contain the individual virtual desktop environments.

In modern workspaces, especially for industries like Banking, Finance, and Healthcare, numerous applications will have to be accessed on-demand, and VDI facilitates convenient and secure remote access, which, in turn, boosts employee productivity. Further, VDI also offers a consistent experience across various devices.

Benefits and Limitations of VDI

Having discussed, what VDI is and how it works, let’s now focus on some of the key benefits of VDI:

  1. Remote access: Traditional desktops can be very restrictive since the user is connected to a single system. As soon as the user is away from the desktop, they are unable to access data and applications anymore. With VDI, however, the end-user can access their virtual desktop from anywhere in the world, day or night.
  2. Security: Another reason why many businesses prefer VDI is because of how secure it is. Traditionally, your data, applications, and operating systems are stored on your local devices, like your laptop or PC. In case the device is damaged or stolen, all the data that is contained within it is compromised. In such a case, not only will you have to purchase a new system, but you will have to download the OS all over again and try to regain access to all the lost data. This can be extremely worrisome for businesses. But, with VDI, since remote data centers store all the data, you, as a user, never have to be worried about data loss. Even if you happen to lose your device, you can access the OS and data on it through any other device.
  3. Device portability: VDI technology helps end-users access their desktop from any device. The key benefit of VDI here is that your desktop is not limited to the hardware. You can, in fact, access it from anywhere in the world and from multiple devices. This means you can use your laptop, tablet, mobile, or any other device to view your desktop.
  4. Decreased cost: When you use VDI, you essentially eliminate hardware expenses. Since you can access the desktop from any device, even the most outdated hardware will do. This translates to cost savings for companies.
  5. Access to superior data center facilities: : When you use VDI offered by a cloud service provider, the virtual desktops are typically stored on servers that are situated in comparatively high-performance data centers. This helps you benefit from features like advanced security, sophisticated disaster recovery plans, and more. While VDI has a number of uses, it also has a few limitations. For instance, the security of a VDI cannot be taken for granted. The OS image will need to be properly updated and managed and the end-client authentication should be performed strictly. Further, it is important that performance adjustments and VDI deployment checks are done from time to time to ensure that technical issues are resolved without any delay. To do these things, organizations will require dedicated IT staff – this, unfortunately, may not be feasible for all businesses.

Benefits and Limitations of VDI
Figure: Benefits and Limitations of VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Basic Components of VDI

The basic components that are part of the virtual desktop infrastructure are:

  1. Virtualization: Virtualization is what separates the system architecture into various layers. Before virtualization, the hardware of a device was linked to the operating system, which meant the OS would crash if there was a hardware failure. This would result in the user losing all their data. But virtualization helps separate the underlying hardware from the operating system via software called a hypervisor. Thus, users can install and use multiple OS on a hypervisor-installed server.
  2. Hypervisor: This is the software that helps separate the hardware from the operating system. The hypervisor creates a virtual environment, wherein the hardware is split into various virtual machines. Each virtual machine has its own configuration, applications, and OS. With respect to virtual desktop infrastructure, the hypervisor helps create multiple desktop instances on these virtual machines. Each desktop instance will then serve as a separate desktop and can be allocated to different users.
  3. Connection broker: This software helps connect desktop instances and users. It is essentially responsible for authenticating end users and connecting them to their specific desktop instances. This software also keeps track of all the inactive and active desktops. So, each time a user requests a connection to a desktop, the connection broker provides the user an inactive desktop instance.
  4. Desktop pools: A desktop pool is a group of similar desktops that can be configured for a specific function. For instance, the entire IT department of an organization may use a desktop pool, where all desktops have the same applications and configuration.
  5. Application virtualization: This technology creates a virtualized application image and then replicates this to all desktops that are part of a desktop pool. The VMware ThinApp, for instance, is an example of this.

Basic Components of VDI

VDI Use Cases

VDI is a key technology for many businesses across numerous industries like Banking, Finance, Healthcare, and more. Remote employees, kiosk workers, medical professionals, contractors, and several other professionals rely on virtual desktop infrastructure in order to access virtual desktops remotely. Thanks to its versatility, businesses can use VDI to give their employees access to standard, non-persistent desktops and also provide them the option to turn their virtual desktops into personalized remote workspaces.

Use case of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
Figure: Use case of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Types of Businesses use VDI

Types of Businesses use VDI

Powering high application availability for an Indian Bank through VDI

Read case study

How to Successfully Implement VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure?

To successfully implement VDI, here are some best practices that you should consider following:

  1. Prepare your network: Since the performance of the VDI is closely interlinked to the performance of the network, it’s important to assess your network and be aware of the peak usage times, so you can anticipate potential demand spokes, which will help you ensure adequate network capacity.
  2. Understand your resource consumption needs: It’s important to avoid under-provisioning, so it’s recommended that you make use of performance monitoring tools to check the resources that are consumed by each virtual desktop. This will help you be aware of your overall resource consumption requirements.
  3. Understand the needs of the end-users: Are your employees task workers who can perform their day-to-day duties through a generic desktop or will they have to customize their desktops? What are the performance requirements of your users? Keep in mind that you need to provision the setup differently for employees who only need access to the internet, users who only use a few basic applications, and those who use graphic-intensive applications.
  4. Run a pilot test: If you can, it’s important that you perform a pilot test before deploying the VDI. Many virtualization providers offer tools that help you run pilot tests. Make sure to do this so you know you have provisioned your resources in the right manner.

How to successfully implement VDI
Figure: How to successfully implement VDI

Why Should You Use VDI in Your Organization?

One of the primary reasons why organizations use VDI is due to its flexibility. Users can access their desktops from pretty much anywhere in the world using any device, as long as they have an internet connection. Further, it helps users collaborate as if they were located in the same office.

Given the fact that virtual desktop infrastructure only sends basic input and output data, you can be assured that sensitive data will never leak from the VDI environment. This makes VDI a lot more secure. While the upfront costs of VDI may seem high, over time, it can result in reduced costs, thus helping you spend on other areas of your business.

Top Reasons to adopt VDI

Figure: Why chose VDI

How Does Anunta Tech Help with VDI?

With over a decade of experience in helping businesses navigate the complexities of design, implementation, and management of VDI environments, our exhaustive domain expertise with regard to virtual desktop infrastructure makes us the most trusted partner across leading enterprises across the world deploying remote desktops for over 500,000 users. With our technology partners VMware, Microsoft, AWS Cloud, and Citrix, we ensure our solutions give you the best possible experience with VDI and add value to your business. To book a free consultation to understand how VDI can help your business or to better understand our offerings, click here.

Why Anunta?

  • 500000

    remote desktops migrated

  • 200000 +

    Users managed globally

  • 10+

    years of implementation and managing remote desktop solutions

Conclusion

If you are thinking about making the switch to a VDI system, make sure to consider how the VDI will fit into your business’s long-term plans. For instance, if you expect to grow substantially in the near future, it’s a good idea to set up VDI so your platform can support the additional users. Also, while deploying VDI can offer long-term benefits, you should be aware that it can be disruptive initially. You may, for example, find that your employees need more training than you expected or you may face some outages when technical problems are first discovered. So, in the beginning, you will need to be prepared to handle such short-term issues. It’s also important to ensure that your IT team and all staff members are on board and prepared to switch to VDI.

As long as you take the above-mentioned points into consideration, the benefits of VDI will be well worth the initial efforts.

FAQs

Why should I use virtual desktops?

Businesses choose to use virtual desktops for various reasons such as increased cybersecurity, collaboration, and reduced IT costs. Further, with a virtual desktop, employees can access their desktops from anywhere in the world – not only does this boost employee morale but it also helps the business hire qualified candidates, irrespective of where they are physically located.

What do I use to connect to a VDI?

Using a virtual desktop is as easy as using a physical desktop. Users can access virtual desktops from anywhere in the world through a connection broker, which acts as an intermediary between the server and the user. Once connected, users can interact with data and applications on the virtual desktop like they would in the case of a physical desktop.

What do you use virtual desktops for?

A virtual desktop gives users the ability to access their desktops, applications, and data from anywhere in the world, on any device. Many businesses have been using virtual desktops because they are centrally managed, thus eliminating the need for app installations and updates on individual desktops. Further, based on the type of desktop virtualization technology that is being used, the end-users may (or may not) be able to customize their desktops and save data locally.

How do I choose a VDI vendor?

Once you’ve decided that VDI is the best solution for your business, choosing the right vendor will require you to be aware of your requirements from the solution. It’s also important that you assess the features, services, and costs that are quoted by the vendor. Further, make sure to also check how reputable the vendor is. With a legacy spanning over 10 years and having partnered with technology companies like Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware, Anunta Tech is a prime choice for enterprises looking for VDI solutions, across the world.

Explore Virtual Desktop Infrastructure with Anunta

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In Remote Working

Work from Home Is Here to Stay. Here’s How Businesses Can Adapt

By 6 Mins Read
Remote Work Solutions for Work from Home Employees

One year ago, only a tiny fraction of employees worked from home on a regular basis. Today, thanks to the pandemic, working from home has gone mainstream, and there is plenty of evidence that the trend is here to stay. Companies of all sizes and across all industries have learned that employees who work from home are not merely able to do their jobs, but actually tend to be more productive. Remote workers also save companies as much as $10,000 per employee annually in real estate costs and make it easier to attract top talent by eliminating the need for new hires to relocate.

Yet despite all of the benefits that remote work offers to companies, it also presents challenges. Over the next year or two, companies’ ability to adapt effectively to the technological, security and regulatory roadblocks that can get in the way of an effective work-from-home strategy will determine which firms are the winners and which the losers in the distributed-workforce landscape.

With that reality in mind, here’s an overview of what companies should be doing to ensure that they are ready to take full advantage of the work-from-home trend.

Why work from home is here to stay

Early in the pandemic, it was easy to assume that the pivot to remote work was just a temporary trend, and that most workers would return to the office soon enough.

The past half-year, however, has demonstrated a different reality. Now, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a large number of workers will continue to work from home, at least part of the time, even after the pandemic recedes into memory.

A University of Chicago report predicts that employees will spend more than one-fifth of their work days working from home after the pandemic ends. Likewise, Gartner believes that nearly half of employees will work remotely at least on a part-time basis post-pandemic. And managers report much less concern about allowing employees to work remotely than they did before the pandemic, suggesting that the C-suite won’t be looking to thwart the ambitions of the more than 90 percent of employees who express a desire to work remotely.

What could get in the way of widespread remote work for some companies, however, is failure to implement the technologies, security protections and compliance solutions necessary to ensure that employees can work effectively from home on a permanent basis.

Work-from-home technology challenges

Perhaps the most obvious challenge for supporting ongoing remote work is ensuring that employees have the technology they need to do their jobs remotely.

It can be easy to underestimate this difficulty. Many companies have long had remote-work solutions like VPNs and Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in place, which allow employees to connect to on-site IT infrastructure while working from home.

The challenge companies are likely to face, however, is that these technologies are insufficient in many cases for full-fledged working from home. It’s one thing to let your employees use a VPN to log in and check email once in a while. It’s another when the majority of your employees are logged in remotely to data-intensive apps all day, overwhelming your VPN server and bringing network connectivity to a crawl.

Along similar lines, employees who work remotely on a frequent basis need to figure out ways to connect peripheral devices like printers that they use at home to the remote workstations they use when connecting from off-site. This can be done using technologies like a VPN, but setting it up is far above the paygrade of the typical employee. Unless workers understand how to configure things like split tunneling and manual routing tables on their home networks, connecting a local printer to a remote VPN is not very feasible.

Fortunately, technologies exist that can radically simplify these headaches. Chief among them are cloud desktops, which allow businesses to replace VPNs and RDP clients with cloud-based virtual desktops that employees can access from anywhere. Many modern cloud desktop solutions also integrate seamlessly with local printers and other devices without requiring complex setup on the part of users.

Securing remote workstations

Another challenge that can be easy to underestimate is ensuring that data and applications remain secure when employees work remotely on a massive scale.

Here again, it’s one thing when employees log in from off-site occasionally to perform basic tasks like checking email. It’s another when they are logged into the company network permanently from at-home devices and networks that may not be secure, and that are impossible for employers to monitor for vulnerabilities or insecure configurations.

Cloud desktops offer a solution to these challenges as well by making it possible to build virtual desktop environments that are completely segmented from whichever at-home devices and networks employees use to connect. With cloud desktops, it doesn’t matter if employees log in from malware-riddled personal computers. The desktops run in isolated virtual machines, essentially eliminating the risk that security problems on personal devices could spillover to company desktops.

Compliance difficulties

Although no major regulatory framework explicitly forbids working from home, many major laws, like HIPAA and the GDPR, include rules related to securing physical access to private data. That becomes much harder to do when employees are downloading sensitive information to their personal devices, or installing business applications directly on them, in order to work from home. Even performing security audits, which is a requirement of regulatory laws like the CPRA, becomes a major challenge if employees are working from home and their desktop environments can’t be reliably monitored from a central location.

Cloud desktops can help on this front, too, by consolidating applications and data in the cloud, where they can be centrally monitored and managed. Cloud desktops also eliminate the need for employees to download sensitive data or applications to private devices. Instead, data can always reside in a secure location in the cloud, while employees still enjoy the flexibility of accessing it remotely.

Conclusion

The solutions businesses need to enable secure, reliable, compliance-friendly remote work solutions for their employees on a permanent basis are out there. The challenge for many companies will be in upgrading their traditional remote-login technologies to support the needs of employees who work from home on a massive scale. Conventional solutions like VPNs and RDP servers won’t necessarily deliver the functionality businesses need for most employees to work remotely, but newer types of platforms, like cloud desktops, can.

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