Co-authored by Priyank Desai.
Did you ever imagine a day where you’d be asked to stay at home to stay healthy? Did you envision a time when the entire company is working from home? Even though we sell end user computing software, we did not see this coming. Our hearts go out to everyone that is impacted by this virus and their loved ones. We salute everyone on the front lines fighting for good – from the hospital and healthcare staff to retail workers providing essential items like groceries to delivery services personnel and many other unsung heroes. These are trying times for humanity as a whole and we will overcome this together. On behalf of VMware, we want to do our part in helping provide the digital backbone to make colleagues productive at hospitals, grocery stores and home.
Working from home is not a new concept for knowledge workers but the global health emergency will force us to re-think how segments of frontline workers can use virtual environments to conduct business. In this environment, most IT departments are asking themselves a simple question: have we provided the right tools to help our colleagues be most productive from home? If not, what are the right tools to enable employee productivity and business continuity? And how do we ensure that security is not compromised while still empowering employees to work in this new environment?
A lot of customers use VMware Workspace ONE for a variety of use cases today. Here are the top three ways we are helping customers enable employee engagement and productivity with business continuity in today’s environment:
Virtual Desktop: While many organizations cannot open their retail stores for business, their digital stores are still open and call volumes to the service desks have gone up. For example, in the travel industry, the volumes in the call centers are through the roof for cancelations and reschedules. If an organization is not setup to have call center employees work from home, VMware Workspace ONE can quickly spin up virtual desktops in the cloud to help businesses enable employees today to better serve their customers without the need to add additional infrastructure. This is a great experience for employees, as it exactly mirrors the familiar experience from their terminal at work! We can enforce strong data loss prevention (DLP) and security policies as employees use their personal devices to remote into the virtual desktop. Corporate data is fully containerized within the virtual desktop and does not leave anything on the local employee’s device. Best of all, this entire environment can be quickly setup in the cloud to help with the capacity burst needed at this time.
Unified App Portal: Almost all types of employees start their work day by touching a device and launching an app. Just last week, a customer commented that their employees have to login more than 50 times throughout the day. Looking at IT helpdesk call analytics, the highest number of requests are related to password reset, app discovery, app access, corporate VPN and corporate Wi-Fi issues. The Workspace ONE unified app portal via Intelligent Hub allows colleagues to access any app on any device with single sign-on. The conditional access policies can be applied in Workspace ONE Access to ensure that we offer a consumer simple, enterprise secure experience. For instance, employees can get a seamless sign-on experience from their work laptop but when using their personal devices, can be prompted for a two-factor authentication to ensure security. In addition to improving employee productivity in a secure environment, the solution can also help reduce helpdesk calls associated with the aforementioned use cases. Employees may also be looking at using new applications to support their team and personal productivity. The unified app catalog provides capabilities for employees to browse popular apps, and complete self-service requests. When new apps are approved by the company for collaboration, communication, and more, you can see notifications when new apps are available.
Secure Mobile Access: Is your workforce able to use their personal smartphones and tablets to securely access email, calendar, contacts, enterprise files, intranet resources, messaging, workspace collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), and other apps today? Many customers successfully use Workspace ONE today to achieve this. As a leader in the unified endpoint management (UEM) space, Workspace ONE provides the best tools for secure mobile access via a variety of ways supporting both mobile device management (MDM) and mobile app management (MAM) allowing companies to manage work apps on personal devices. And this can be achieved in multiple ways. Our solution can help your colleagues securely access Microsoft Office apps, G-Suite apps as well as native iOS and Android apps. For the highly regulated entities in financial services, healthcare, DoD, etc., we provide our suite of secure productivity apps. In lieu of COVID-19, many customers are experiencing that their VPN solutions were not built for all employees to work at home. Adding VPN concentrators at scale could also be very costly. Workspace ONE solves this in a unique way by enabling per-app VPN tunnel thereby reducing the load on VPN concentrators.
Our ways of working are going to change forever. Even as we all go back to our normal routines post this pandemic, the new ways of working virtually from anywhere will increase employee productivity. As our work and personal lives are only getting more tightly intermingled, flexible workstyles will be a perk offered by companies to attract and retain top talent. Do you need assistance to make your employees more productive today? If yes, reach out to your VMware sales representation. We have the technology and our professional services teams are equipped to remotely help you make your colleagues productive.
