With the news that several large corporations such as Amazon are insisting their employees return to the office full time, it could be thought that the hybrid working revolution was merely a blip caused by lockdown necessity.
It remains to be seen whether this reversion will be successful or whether it will cause another wider adjustment as employees seek the employment that best reflects their needs.
Certainly, it should be seen as part of the continuum of an accelerating process of realignments as issues including trust, technology, productivity, creativity, family, finance and mental health shape the future of work.
Why hybrid working is still a necessity
Whether hybrid working remains a part of an organization’s primary working strategy or not, it is critical that they retain the capability to do so to ensure business resiliency. The disruptions that impact physical office attendance will continue to exist and may well increase as the world becomes more unpredictable. From severe weather events to social unrest and global political shifts, there are a plethora of problems which will undermine attempts to confidently forecast mid to long-term plans.
The ability to flex as challenges and opportunities arise must be a fundamental consideration for all businesses. Developing an effective capability for remote and hybrid work enables employees to work from home or other locations if the office becomes inaccessible. Disregarding any other outcomes from recent years, this is a lesson that should not be forgotten.
Why technology is a key enabler for business resilience
Adopting technologies will be key for businesses to achieve the level of business resiliency required to support all working policies. For example, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) supports remote and hybrid working and can also be leveraged to improve other aspects of business resiliency, security, scalability and efficiency.
VDI situates PC or workstation resources on a server, rather than a laptop or desk-based device. This enables resources to sit alongside other server-based services in a central location, whether that be an office server room, a data center or the cloud. The virtual desktops are accessed with a low-spec device, often an inexpensive laptop or ‘thin client’, through an application or browser, over the network or internet. The experience for the end user remains the same so long as the service has been appropriately specified and configured, meaning employees can work from almost anywhere with an internet connection.
The key benefits of VDI
To ensure greater business protection, VDI (and its related infrastructure) should be located in a high-end data center to guarantee additional levels of resiliency. These would generally include dual and diverse power and connectivity, backup power generators, high levels of environmental management and physical and network security (such as DDOS protection). Such measures are important to reduce the risk of downtime, whether your employees are working from home or the office. Public and private cloud vendors will offer this level of service as a rule.
Centralizing all business resources also improves security. Data stays within a centrally managed network, rather than being located or replicated across multiple external devices, which exponentially increases vulnerability to attack. Employees only have inexpensive, dumb devices in hand, which are harder to hack and less problematic if stolen or damaged. Reducing the use of VPNs, replication and edge device data reduces the attack surface considerably.
Many VDI providers also offer scalability for organizations to flex their resources in line with their current needs. This type of dynamic resourcing is one of the big promises of cloud computing and is extremely attractive, especially when long-term forecasting is a challenge. There is a cost associated with such dynamism, but balancing this with less expensive, dedicated core resources allows for both reliability and agility.
Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of VDI is the efficiency that it can introduce to computer estate management. Administering through web-based control panels enables IT administrators to manage everything remotely, regardless of where the end user is based. Virtual desktops can be spun up or disabled in minutes, creating huge savings in the time that would otherwise be spent on physical device deployments and decommissioning. Resources can be reallocated across machines, users quickly reassigned and fresh images deployed rapidly, simplifying office moves and reorganizations.
Embracing the VDI opportunity for all working policies
There exists some understandable nervousness about hybrid working and VDI. For many organizations, this still seems a step too far from their long embedded and comfortable working practices and technologies. Alongside the recent push for a return to office working by some organizations, there has also been a parallel shift with other early adopters moving away from public cloud services; the latter primarily due to its expense and lack of ROI. Thankfully there are growing private cloud services that offer better and more accessible offerings, which ensure that the promise of cloud and VDI can still be realized. This will be important in the coming years which are sure to be full of new challenges and opportunities.
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