One morning you wake up to find your business isn’t as essential as you think it is and someone who you’ve probably never met has made the decision your entire team are having to now work from home.
You’ve shied away ‘Bring Your Own Device’, and don’t have the management infrastructure in place to deal with people using their own personal equipment.
Those who have laptops make arrangements to collect them from the office (of course, they have laptops that sit permanently on their desk).
Those who have a desktop…well, they make arrangements with the IT team to get it unplugged and bundled into a car or taxi and make its way to their home.
You quickly realise your IT support function cannot cope with being an entirely remote service to the business, replacement assets aren’t readily available due to global demand and a shortage on raw materials. The support function is struggling to keep up standards and keep the operations teams happy and productive.
This isn’t what you had in mind and maybe you weren’t entirely aware of how deep the relationship between technology and your business went. Email was always known to be critical … and now you realise all IT systems, solutions and devices are all critical to some degree or another.
And it all starts at the desktop.
What’s important about the desktop is that it isn’t the device, it’s the platform, the operating system and the applications combined.
These are the tools your staff use to perform their job (assuming they’re desk-jockeys).
In the last 18 months have you awoken to the idea that there are different solutions that connect your people to data via applications? Enter Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).
Never heard of it? Someone isn’t helping you then…VDI should be single-handedly changing the entire IT landscape and you should know about it.
Imagine that it doesn’t matter the device, you can connect to the application. The application can connect you to the data and information you need. The application performs better than it ever did on the creaky laptop/desktop you’ve been suffering with for 7 years whilst the finance team sweats every last drop of residual value from it.
The data is held centrally (in a decentralised, redundant storage service of course); which means it can be better managed, protected, secured, shared, collaborated on.
Imagine your IT team need to update the application and didn’t have to redistribute to every single person in your organisation; just update a central copy which is then referenced the next time the application is accessed by a team member.
What if a number of the team need access (or don’t) to an application. Your IT team can quickly see who has access, what licences are available, redistribute and reallocate as needed, centrally, rather than concerning themselves with drawn-out audits that feel like painting the Forth Bridge.
The virtual desktop provides all of this and more.
Work with a VDI and scale it as you need it, create profiles based on role and functions in the business (the CAD team get workstation performance for rendering and the sales team get the right application suite to manage their customer information). Fit the accessing device around the person and let go of the need for capacity or capability tied to the task being done – the function and performance exist in the data centre now.
So whilst you’ve been reacting to events – are you now moving forward and realising the benefits of the technology that’s readily available to you or are you leaning on old habits and investing in physical infrastructure which is likely to be not exactly fit for purpose? Has your enterprise just ordered new top-spec laptops for example? Check out VDI and see how you can seriously provide flexibility to your team who rely on devices to access applications and data to deliver exceptional service to your customers.
Move the story along a bit and imagine a lightweight device connects to a lightweight operating system which then connects to task-specific applications that are tailored to role, function and output. This is happening right now – it doesn’t mean to say you should be doing it now or that you’re seriously losing out but you should be aware there’s a digital revolution happening and it’s possible to transform your business to benefit from it.
Long live the (virtual) desktop.