Note: VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud is publishing a blog series on business continuity and what we’re doing to support our community, customers, and partners amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Check out these other published pieces:
- The Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Business Networks with Real Data
- Is Your WAN Prepared for the COVID-19 Pandemic? It will be with SD-WAN
Empowering a Remote Workforce
The current quickly evolving COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the need for a flexible workplace environment. Many organizations have either recommended or mandated employees to work from home as a result of this ever-escalating global health crisis.
Organizations are embracing new applications and cloud to stay competitive and differentiated in today’s fast-paced digital economy. The concept of any cloud and any application accessed by anyone using any device is widely accepted. The modern workforce continues to evolve and demands more reliable access to resources and applications yet with more flexibility in terms of work locations.
If meeting flexible workplace requirements is one of the many priorities of organizations under normal circumstances, it becomes even more urgent now, in these uncertain and tumultuous times. As this health crisis evolved from an epidemic in China to a pandemic globally, the need to transform the way employees work has become an imperative. Organizations must find a means to carry out business activities without in-person interactions, helping to flatten the curve of the disease spread and protect our communities.
Customer Challenges
Organizations are facing a number of challenges when embarking upon the journey to enable a remote digital workforce and provide flexible work locations. These challenges include:
- Delay in new remote/home office rollout as a result of repetitive and complex home/edge device provisioning.
- Unsatisfactory end user experience due to manual day 2 operations that lack performance visibility and corporate-wide business policies.
- Difficult and expensive to maintain quality and performance standards for both traditional and cloud applications without costly private lines as transport.
- A less secure environment that makes it hard to protect user, data, applications, and networking due to the distributed nature of home users, devices, and workloads.
- Compliant and regulatory requirements that must be considered when workloads are in the cloud.
SD-WAN Enables Work from Home
VMware SD-WAN is ideal for enterprises seeking business continuity solutions to enable a remote digital workforce, delivering consumer simplicity, enterprise quality, and maximum flexibility in a dynamic and challenging environment.
VMware SD-WAN™ by VeloCloud® rapidly empowers a remote digital workforce and enables business continuity, now and in the future, by delivering consumer simplicity, business quality, and cloud-scalability. With VMware SD-WAN, organizations can support secure, reliable access for traditional and SaaS applications, including VOIP, UCaaS, Collaboration, and VDI, from providers such as Microsoft 365, Zoom Meeting, Vonage, Ring Central, Windstream, VMware Horizon Cloud, and more. Available as-a-service backed by 120+ service providers worldwide, VMware SD-WAN delivers an optimal teleworking experience for enterprise work at home users through a hyperscale model with a global network of 2,000+ cloud gateways in 100+ PoPs.
SD-WAN Ensures Reliability and Performance
VMware SD-WAN is the industry-leading WAN Edge platform for optimal, reliable, secure, and automated access to traditional and new applications—in the on-premises data center or cloud— delivering enterprise quality access to work at home users. SD-WAN benefits include:
- Assured performance for traditional on-premises and SaaS applications with innovative Dynamic Multipath Optimization™ (DMPO).
- Secure, reliable access to traditional on-premises applications through secure VPN and through encryption, secure network isolation, advanced segmentation, and enhanced network security.
- Optimized resource and application access to IaaS, and SaaS through VMware Cloud Gateways—a unique control point that are strategically located in the proximity of all major internet PoPs.
- Enterprise reliability, security, performance, and scale to @home users.
- Reliable and assured VOIP and UCaaS services from providers such as Vonage, RingCentral, and JIVE.
- Streamlined access to collaboration services such as Microsoft Office 365 and Zoom Meeting.
- Support for VDI from Citrix and VMware, and delivery of highest quality VMware Horizon VDI experience.
VMware SD-WAN provides organizations with one of the fastest and easiest ways to stand up and manage a home office, reducing provisioning and deployment time from days to hours or minutes. Our Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) offers simplified provisioning and configuration without the need for a network administrator or expert. VMware SD-WAN offers simplified day-2 operations for troubleshooting and management through automation and policy-based management.
VMware SD-WAN Work @Home
Providing quality access from home is critical in empowering employees to continue business activities in this uncertain time. VMware SD-WAN is the industry-leading WAN Edge services platform for both branch and at home users, delivering simple, reliable, secure, and optimized access to traditional and cloud applications.
To help organizations quickly empower a remote digital workforce, VMware is introducing the VMware SD-WAN Work @Home free trial offer, which provides end user hardware and hosted services for up to 90-days for up to 100 employees using two Work @Home bundles.
With the VMware SD-WAN Work @Home offer, along with offers from VMware WorkSpace One and EUC, organizations can rapidly and successfully transform their workforce to work from home in response to the COVID-19 health crisis. The offers from VMware help reduce disruption and ensure business continuity in this unprecedented time.
To learn more about how VMware SD-WAN can help with your work from home challenges, see the VMware SD-WAN Work @Home page.