Months after COVID-19 emerged, it’s becoming clear that many of the changes it brought to today’s workforce are here to stay. More of us are working from home, using our own laptops, tablets, and thin clients to stay productive.
Today’s workforce is more distributed than ever. In-home PC and Mac traffic was up by 29% in April 2020, compared to 2019. The digital transformation that was already underway has kicked into high gear. If you’re an IT administrator, this explosion in data and traffic creates some new challenges.
Your users are looking to you to ensure a consistent end user experience, whether they are working in an office or connecting from home. Their needs may vary widely, from power users with advanced needs to light users who require only minimal performance.
Scaling and managing your operations to support a more distributed, diverse workforce isn’t easy. Your team may not be set up to troubleshoot home IT network issues. You’ve got to manage network connectivity between clients, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and virtual applications, all of which are subject to latency, loss, and congestion. Many of the challenges you face will be outside the VDI protocol, and you may be juggling and prioritizing a complex mix of real-time voice, video, and VDI traffic.
Traditional WANs can’t keep pace with the new normal
Typical wide area networks (WANs) weren’t designed for today’s complexities. Based on the assumption that most applications reside in the data center, they can’t keep up with today’s digital workspace requirements. Users accessing applications in the branch office, remote locations, or at home have their traffic backhauled to the data center.
As more applications move to the cloud, backhauling traffic before it is sent to the cloud destination creates poor application experiences, introducing latency that can sap performance of applications like real-time voice and video. Backhauling traffic also wastes bandwidth in premium WAN links, to the point where the data center actually becomes a choke point.
Management is a headache, because when you want to add an application in the cloud, you need to change the policies at each and every site, introducing more complexity and delays. If your security policies remain tied to the data center, it’s increasingly difficult to maintain a strong security posture with more applications in the cloud and an increasingly distributed workforce.
Making your network and security services enablers for transformation
There’s a better way to ensure an exceptional experience for today’s users. VMware SD-WAN™, together with VMware Horizon, enables WAN transformation that takes you beyond yesterday’s data center-focused approaches. VMware SD-WAN lets you simplify WAN operations by deploying an overlay network quickly, with a minimal learning curve. Whether you have 50 sites or 5,000 sites, you can control the speed at which you transform your traditional WAN infrastructure. The solution provides assured application performance, so you can know that every business application will get the right treatment at any site based on policy. Instead of asking IT to manually configure policies at each site, the solution dynamically adapts to local conditions, so you can deliver a consistent experience to every user, regardless of their location.
Designed to ease cloud adoption, the solution gives you complete choice in SaaS applications or public cloud providers you go with. Whether you’re working with AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, you’ll get direct cloud access via gateway as a service. Its intrinsic security supports end-to-end segmentation, and lets you define the security policies that make the most sense for your business. Using a technology called Dynamic Multipath Optimization™ (DMPO) VMware SD-WAN takes into account the current performance of WAN links. It automatically recognizes and steers applications to best links based on business priority and built-in knowledge of application network requirements.
Horizon complements VMware SD-WAN by making it easy for you to deploy and scale virtual desktops and apps from a single control plane, so you can support remote workers at home or branch offices. It offers rapid provisioning, automation, and eases your management tasks, so you can be sure you are extending the best digital workspace experience to your end users.
Explore the possibilities at our webinar
If you’d like to take a closer look at how VMware SD-WAN enables reliable, efficient and secure access to virtual desktops and multi-cloud applications, join us at our free webinar. Digital Workspace Transformation with VMware Horizon and VMware SD-WAN will show you how Horizon VDI clients in a global distributed enterprise benefit from a rich experience when accessing virtual desktops and cloud applications.
Register for our live online event, October 29 at 10:00 am Pacific time, or view it on demand.
Designed to ease cloud adoption, the solution gives you complete choice in SaaS applications or public cloud providers you go with. Whether you’re working with AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, you’ll get direct cloud access via gateway as a service. Its intrinsic security supports end-to-end segmentation, and lets you define the security policies that make the most sense for your business. Using a technology called Dynamic Multipath Optimization™ (DMPO) VMware SD-WAN takes into account the current performance of WAN links. It automatically recognizes and steers applications to best links based on business priority and built-in knowledge of application network requirements.
