How Windows Virtual Desktop is Enabling Effective and Secure Remote Working
Tools for improving the employee experience, collaboration and innovation
From the start of the 2020 pandemic, the global economy has benefitted enormously from workplace innovative and smart workplace technology that has enabled remote working. From call-center workers to medical professionals, the entire world has been forced to use its creativity and the technology available to them to carry on working while maintaining social distancing measures.
As such, more people are working remotely today than ever before. And while this was an impressive feat, especially at the start of the 2020 pandemic, simple enablement is no longer enough. Business leaders that want their employees to work remotely long term need to be able to provide an environment that allows them to do that work effectively.
This means not only providing the necessary digital workplace collaboration tools to allow them to collaborate and innovate freely but also maintain a high level of security at all times that will flexibly and intuitively protect enterprise data. All while allowing leaders to proactively drive cost savings.
At Fujitsu, we’ve worked in collaboration with Microsoft and Citrix to create such a digital environment – our cloud-delivered Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD).
In this blog, I am going to go into some of the features that make WVD such a powerful tool for businesses and their workforces and illustrate the importance of delivering experiences through cloud services.
Agility in the workplace – driving business success
Agile, flexible working has become integral to the success of any company. Right now, organizations need to be able to flexibly provide a secure and consistent experience on any device anywhere in the world, and that’s what we strived to create with WVD.
To achieve this, we leveraged the same cloud-based experience that Azure uses to enable Microsoft 365 and Windows 10. This means we can provide connectivity, ensure a good experience overall and provide the necessary IT support if things go wrong.
We ensure help comes in a variety of ways including automated responses and multiple channels of support. And we can remotely manage security in the advent of a missing or stolen device, whether they’re personal or ones we or our partners supplied.
We also provide regular training and education sessions around new communication and collaboration tools so they can be used effectively by organizations.
These measures all ensure what we call the ‘roundness’ of the security experience. This means that we can protect the devices and data (both enterprise and personal) that all exists in the same secure environment, while providing a holistic experience for users.
Protecting data in a fully multi-cloud environment has become key in recent years. The modern workplace can expect to have data sitting in different SaaS locations, cloud services and on premises locations. So, we have to make sure that for every possible point of penetration, we have a solution ready.
Even when developing WVD, as remote teams working for different firms, we wouldn’t have been able to collaborate so fluidly and integrate new features and tools at such a rapid speed if we hadn’t been delivering through the Cloud.
So, it’s vital that organizations understand that to build real business resilience and combat the uncertainty we face, they need workforces capable of working securely and flexibly at pace from anywhere in the world. And that’s only achieved through the effective use of cloud services.
Driving effective change
Many CIOs are continuing to use the heightened speed of decision making that has been necessitated by the pandemic to accelerate their digital transformation.
WVD supports this by giving these leaders the flexibility of paying in line with the usage patterns of their workforce, allowing them to derive cost benefits from services that are always on.
By freeing organizations from traditional office restrictions, leaders can enable different work patterns for staff. Individual employees can choose their ideal work experiences and organizations can widen their talent pool and bring in new workers at the same or often better price points than normal.
So, with a workforce all over the world, companies can build more productive daily models which aren’t restricted to the 9-5 schedule of one time zone, resulting in more engaged workers.
And by minimalizing hardware investment and allowing firms to be agile and implement or scale services in just hours and days, not weeks and months, WVD lets businesses onboard new starters faster – improving the initial perception for new employees and remote workers and creating immediate positive impact.
Leaders can also bring in contract and gig workers into their network flexibly and securely, further fostering the agility and resilience that allows businesses to thrive in uncertain times.
The future workplace
As consumer and employee expectations continue to change, flexibility will become increasingly vital.
For example, as newer generations of employees enter the workforce, these digital natives will want to automate more mundane tasks and make room for more creative work. And with the power of Microsoft, Citrix and Fujitsu combined, we’re able to enhance the efficiency of actions through micro-applications and automation of processes.
We also go further to enable the democratization of application development and data analytics by enabling the power users to accelerate your business differentiation through their creativity being unleashed.
Being able to decentralize decision-making will be key to unleashing the future innovations that will unlock the next stage of capabilities in the digital workplace.
WVD allows leaders to start that journey today. They can drive up engagement levels and efficiency in their workforce, which drives up productivity, all while also cutting down on costs, managing risk better and improving their business resilience.
We can ensure that journey is successful, and help organizations build an adaptive workforce ready for the future of work.
Find out more about FUJITSU Work Life Shift, our global solutions to transform the work style under the new normal.
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