Working from home is not that unusual, a large percentage of the self-employed and freelance participants in the gig economy have been doing it for years. A small, but growing, number of businesses are now exclusively ‘virtual’, existing entirely over the internet and without a single brick of dedicated office space to their name. But, as the performance of the technology these home workers use continues to improve, the potential for others to work from home is increasing greatly.
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Dom Poloniecki[/caption]
This year, that rate of technological advance is reaching a tipping point. It is now very close to being able to provide even the biggest businesses with the chance to have a large percentage of their staff work from home, or indeed from almost anywhere that they happen to be. This has real advantages for the staff, as they can work where is best suited to their needs and at times that match both them and the business need. It also saves them commuting time, which can add up to tens of hours of lost productivity a week.
In addition, it helps the business by keeping operating costs low and flexibility high. The technology available to them now means they no longer need the investment in larger office complexes, with all the associated support infrastructure. It also means they can be more flexible when it comes to meeting changing market demands. New work teams can be created in seconds online, rather than having to physically move people and their resources around an office block.
There is a downside to this change, however, and that is the issue of security. Having staff work at home opens them up to a wide range of security weak points, many of which have, in the past, led many businesses to back away from the idea of homeworking staff. But there are solutions now available that not only defend the operations of a business from security attacks, but also allows the staff to work on applications with high performance and graphical needs, with much lower internet bandwidth and latency requirements."
The answer to these problems is the virtualised desktop environment. Indeed, it has been for many years, but was held back by the limited range of applications and services that can effectively exploit it. Put simply, the power and performance requirements of the typical ‘power user’ has, for some time, far outstripped what is available from the typical virtual desktop service.
However, this is changing. The availability of higher performance, hyperconverged compute resources, coupled with new software technologies and the early availability of 5G is opening up entirely new opportunities for making seriously good use of the core VDI approach, while maintaining high levels of security by only ever streaming pixelated representations of tasks on applications running in the cloud.
