COVID-19 has forced many organizations to abruptly shift to work-from-home, putting huge pressure on IT teams to quickly support, scale and secure an unparalleled transformation of the workforce.
Managing infrastructure to support this shift has grown in importance vs. other IT priorities, according to a survey of IT leaders by Insight Enterprises. The top challenges: Improving network and data security and recovery; enabling remote IT management; increasing cloud-based networking.
Companies with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) were ahead of the curve in meeting the challenges. In addition, many organizations were able to respond to work-from-home edicts by spinning up new VDI deployments using technologies such as VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Horizon, Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure and other Dell solutions.
Embracing VDI is neither temporary nor a mere quick fix. As noted by Evaluator Group, the ability to support VDI at scale “will become a permanent fixture of enterprise IT strategies” and the “preferred environment for hosting an at-home workforce.” The reasons:
- Security enforcement is more effective.
- Management can be centralized and automated.
- Desktops and applications can be delivered through employees’ own computing devices.
- Supporting infrastructure can be ramped up and down quickly.
In addition, with solutions powered by NVIDIA—ranging from fully featured Dell Technologies hyperconverged infrastructure, converged infrastructure, servers, desktops and laptops to Dell Wyse thin clients—IT teams can now use VDI to empower all users, including those requiring sophisticated computer-aided design (CAD), engineering, industrial design and content-creation capabilities.
Success Stories in Remote Work
Here are examples of three organizations that are successfully using VDI to empower remote work:
Nol-Tec Systems is an example of a company that already had a VDI solution in place and was able to respond quickly and efficiently when the company was forced to go fully remote in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nol-Tec is a leader in pneumatic bulk-materials handling and other complex environmental solutions. It had a VDI solution based on VMware Horizon, VMware Cloud Foundation and Dell PowerEdge Servers. Thanks to VDI, the company was able to go 100% remote work while maintaining business resiliency, service and support for all customers.
PIK Group is an example of a company leveraging VDI to empower remote workers who have intense demands for computer graphics capabilities. PIK has built 25 million square meters of housing in the Russian market and employs 2,000 design engineers in what it describes as the largest architectural bureau in Europe. With VDI, PIK has transformed its workplace by empowering employees to work securely from home, setting their own work schedules, while using a sophisticated 3-D building information modeling application. The solution is secure and reliable while delivering the performance, capacity and scale required by very demanding users.
Gould Evans is another company that has empowered designers and architects to work remotely, including those using compute- and graphics-intensive applications such as Autodesk Revit and Trible SketchUp. In evaluating solutions, the firm was concerned that VDI wouldn’t be able to handle its extreme graphics requirements. However, the combination of VMware, Dell EMC PowerEdge rack servers with NVIDIA Quadro vDWS software, and NVIDIA GPUs has been transformational for the company. Gould Evans now has the flexibility to work with client projects using both on-site and remote teams, and can quickly and easily provision resources when designers need additional capacity for graphics-heavy projects.
Securing Remote Desktops: Don’t Forget the Data
Learn how the shift to remote workforces impacts current and future IT infrastructure and what enterprises should do now to prepare for an increasingly work-from-anywhere world.
Download NowLooking Ahead
One of the lessons of COVID-19 has been to be prepared for anything. IT leaders certainly weren’t planning their investments with the idea that there would be a pandemic on the horizon.
However, by working with trusted partners like Dell Technologies and VMware, and investing in solutions such as VDI—giving IT more control over key areas such as performance, security, scale and management—many companies were prepared to react quickly and efficiently when the unexpected became reality.
The expansion of remote work is here to stay, regardless of the course of the pandemic. If, indeed, VDI at scale will become a permanent fixture of enterprise IT strategies, now is the time to evaluate where, when and how your organization can put the right solutions in place.
With options such as Dell Technologies on Demand, customers can take advantage of flexible consumption and as-a-service solutions across the entire Dell portfolio, from workforce solutions to the data center, from edge to core to cloud.
For more information on supporting remote work, please visit Dell Technologies.
