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.
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.
For example, Nutanix recently demonstrated just how effective the development in virtual desktop services have become, by showing a Game of Thrones video clip that became famous on social media: the one where a Starbucks coffee cup appeared in an ale house scene, and then using its Xi Frame to edit the cup out of the clip in real time, live on stage
Such levels of performance can now be brought together with the inherent security that comes with virtualised desktop services. All data and compute services are run on the servers behind the company firewall and are never loaded onto any remote machine that an individual may be using. All that is transmitted is a pixel stream of the user’s screen – carrying either that user’s input in terms of new data, or requests for action, and the results and output from the servers as a pixel stream scraped from a virtual screen. The pixel streams can even be encrypted for added security.
This development has significantly changed the potential of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), bringing together the inherent security advantages of having all processes and data run in controlled and defended server environments, either on-premise or in the cloud, with the ability to deliver far greater application complexity via the cloud and WiFi services.
At this time where homeworking is a requirement, not a choice, the adoption of highly secure virtual desktop environments is now a boardroom issue. As we emerge from this unprecedented time, businesses and staff will have a huge amount of freedom about where and when they work, fundamentally changing the way the workforce will operate in the future – creating a whole new set of challenges and opportunities.
Guest Blog by Dom Poloniecki, General Manager, Sales, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa region, Nutanix
