6 Reasons to Consider Cloud-Delivered Workspaces to Provide Optimal Employee Experiences
It’s an employee’s market and employers need to do everything they can to keep their workforce engaged, productive and happy. In fact, the U.S. has more job openings now than any other time in history. To keep workers on the job, many enterprises are prioritizing their end user computing experience. And well, they should.
With so many employees now working remotely full-time or in a hybrid workplace environment, a productive and collaborative computing experience is both needed and expected by today’s digital workers. Further, companies that can’t deliver a more engaging computing experience will face an uphill battle in attracting and keeping the best talent. This will ultimately impact both customer experience and revenue as well. According to Qualtrics, high team engagement contributes to 21% greater profitability and a 20% increase in sales, pointing to the direct value happy employees can have on the business.
The Cost of Traditional VDI
To deliver end user computing many companies have adopted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology, often turning to well-known brands who established themselves in the category decades ago. These solutions typically deliver the employee desktop through on-premises servers which are maintained by in-house IT teams. The problem? They can be very complex to manage and maintain, are very costly to license, require expensive hardware and are infamously hard to support.
This complexity can also translate into lower capabilities which effect the end user experience. Login times, for example can become dramatically impacted when complex traditional VDI implementations fall into disrepair. Access to necessary applications and data as well as security and policy limitations are also common challenges with legacy solutions. But heavy technology investments and solution licensing can “lock” enterprises in, a costly endeavor which will ultimately put a toll on user experience, and the business.
Benefits of Modern Cloud-Delivered Workspaces
One way to break free of this VDI vendor “lock in” and ensure a better end user computing experience is the adoption of modern, cloud-delivered workspaces or desktop-as-a-service solutions. By shifting desktop workspaces to the cloud, organizations can achieve the flexibility, security and user empowerment today’s workers need, while lowering cost and lightening IT staff loads.
When considering how to support your remote or hybrid workforce, consider these six advantages of a cloud model for delivering virtual desktops, such as Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), versus the restrictions of traditional on-premises VDI solutions.
- Improved Scalability. One of the biggest takeaway lessons of the pandemic for IT teams has been recognition of the value of rapid response to change. Many enterprises needed to quickly support the work from home needs of their users, and that required the ability to quickly scale their end user computing environments. For those relying on traditional VDI this was harder than expected because scaling on-premises infrastructure was a big barrier to success. Alternatively, delivering employee workspaces from the cloud makes scalability easy. The environment can be easily scaled up and down when needed without a large infrastructure investment or heavy management overhead. In many cases, it can be as easy as clicking a button to add additional users or remove employees who have left the company.
- Lower Cost. Supporting workspaces via public clouds like Azure, AWS and GPC is also much lower cost than traditional VDI, which is known for having very pricy and lengthy licensing structures. Furthermore, by delivering user workspaces as a cloud-delivered service, the investment is a consumption-based operating expense, not a heavy capital expense.
- Greater Access to Apps and Data. With the cloud’s deployment simplicity, it’s also easy to enable user access to the apps and data they need to get their job done with efficiency. This not only keeps users productive and content but also helps eliminate the risk of users deploying their own, unauthorized apps which can create a “shadow IT” environment that increases security gaps and exposure risk.
- Ensured Business Continuity. With corporate apps and data secured in the public cloud, the risk of unplanned interruption or downtime is avoided. Business data and apps are not at risk of a datacenter outage or disaster. Instead, data is consistently accessible via the cloud with protection assurance through the public cloud’s SLAs for redundancy and high availability.
- Increased Security. Using cloud-delivered workspaces will minimize the security threat surface and help prevent security risk at the endpoint. When using identity and access management best practices, DaaS environments can protect sensitive data and ensure that only those that absolutely need to have access do, providing a much more tightly secured computing perimeter.
- High Performance for Graphics-Heavy Workloads. For users that require access to graphics-intensive workloads or are heavy users of collaboration environments, such as Microsoft Teams, cloud-delivered workspaces are also an ideal choice. They can enable high computing power without requiring the cost of high-performance endpoint computers as the compute operations are performed in the public cloud environment rather than locally on the user’s device.
If employee experience is as important to your business as it is for most, consider the value of migrating physical desktops to virtual desktops in the cloud. Not only can it be achieved without changing the user experience much at all, you’ll realize so many more benefits in terms of management simplicity, cost savings, security and user productivity. It may just be the solution your environment needs to charge up the employee productivity, loyalty and engagement your business needs to spur growth.
Vadim Vladimirskiy, CEO and Co-founder, Nerdio
Image licensed by unsplash.com
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