Over the last two months, organizations across the world have shifted to work from home and put business continuity plans into place. Now that we’re starting to adjust to this new normal, it’s a good time to take stock of how far we’ve come, and what needs we must address next.
In our business continuity series, we’ve addressed a variety of technical, business, and cultural issues, and discussed how customers can use VMware’s End-User Computing products to adapt. In addition, many customers also turn to help from system integrator and system outsourcer (SISO) partners.
In relation to these points, on Thursday, May 7, VMware COO Sanjay Poonen will join one of our SISO partners, HCL, in a webinar called “Preparing Enterprise for the New Normal: The Rise of the Borderless Digital Workplace.” Here are the details:
• “Preparing Enterprise for the New Normal: The Rise of the Borderless Digital Workplace,” presented by HCL
• Thursday, May 7, 2020
• 8:00 am PDT | 11:00 am EDT | 4:00 pm BST | 8:30 pm IST
• Length: 60 minutes
• More info here | Register here
Where are we now and what do we have to do next?
Again, it’s a good time to look at how far we have come, and what tasks are next.
In early March, we were discussing what to do if you suddenly have to support 80% of your users working remotely. Overall, organizations have had to scale up many different services. They expanded Horizon deployments and leveraged remote access to physical PCs. They enrolled large numbers of all types of devices into Workspace ONE UEM. And they gave users access to additional SaaS apps for collaboration and video chat.
So, what’s next? Here are some examples of things that organizations might be thinking about.
I spoke to a customer that scaled up their Horizon VDI environment by taking excess data center capacity—which under normal circumstances would be used for disaster recovery or as swing space during maintenance downtime—and putting it into full-time production to support additional users working from home. This was tremendously helpful and needed, but now, the customer is re-examining their disaster recovery capacity. (And remember, disaster recovery and business continuity are different things.) The customer is evaluating Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS.
In another example, many organizations have taken loaner laptops or laptops that were previously scheduled to be retired and used them to enable more employees to work from home. Again, this is a great first step, but now it’s time to consider strategies loaner fleets, remote support, and device refreshes going forward.
VPNs have been under immense pressure, too. At my friend’s company, half the employees were told to use the VPN in the morning, and other half in the afternoon, a short-term fix. Organizations could rack and stack more appliances, but clearly, it’s a good time to instead re-evaluate strategies here.
It’s clear that now that most employees are working from home, it’s time to move from network-centric client management to cloud-based modern management. While some organizations are beginning to make plans to gradually and safely bring employees back into the office, there’s widespread agreement that organizations will allow much more work from home in the future. To support this, it’s a good time to explore cloud-based client management.
Lastly, for many organizations, one of the keys to business continuity has been allowing users to log into SaaS apps and virtual desktops from their personal desktops. While some might have thought of BYOD policies in terms of personal phones, now it’s time to expand BYOD policies and tools to cover Windows, macOS, and Chrome OS laptops, too. This in turn has the benefit of
Final thoughts
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’m incredibly inspired by the work that folks across the EUC industry have done to enable work from home, as well as safer work on the front lines. Now, there’s a lot of work to be done to optimize the new end-user computing environment.
VMware’s Sanjay Poonen will be talking about all of this on May 7 with HCL. Remember that prior to being named COO, Sanjay lead the End-User Computing business unit; so, I’m especially interested to hear what he has to say about all these issues. Please join us on Thursday!
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