According to a BitSight report involving more than 41,000 organizations, “Identifying Unique Risks of Work From Home Remote Office Networks,” the findings revealed that, “45% of companies had malware on their corporate-associated home networks.” That’s why you need to implement the best security & management solution – Windows Virtual Desktop.
In the past, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) could ignore the cybersecurity of its limited remote employees. However, this is not possible today as work-from-home has become the new normal.
Remote Work Challenges & Solutions For SMBs
The two biggest challenges for business owners who find themselves in this new work-
from-home scenario are…
1) How do I properly manage my employees?
2) Which technology do we really need to pull this off?
The past several weeks have forced business owners to come up with innovative ideas and management solutions for employees.
It’s a whole different ball game now. Apart from management tactics, technology plays a crucial role in enabling management practices and eradicating vulnerabilities using a combination of the following tools…
Virtual desktops, SD-WAN, firewall, and a printer/scanner. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
provides employees with access to apps, software, and technology that they utilize on their home computer.
Today we’re going to take an in-depth approach to understand why Windows Virtual Desktop is the best security and management solution for employees working from home.
Windows Virtual Desktops
Windows Virtual Desktop is a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that delivers simplified management, multi-session Windows 10 interface, support for Office 365 ProPlus, and a Remote Desktop Services (RDS) environment.
A VDI allows you to host multiple desktop environments for different users on a central server, such as Microsoft Azure. The specific desktop environments are run within virtual machines (VMs) and delivered to end users over the network.
Challenges Of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
One of the challenges of deploying VDI is related to applications. Apps such as Office or Outlook require persistent storage, like one virtual machine (VM) per client system.
Persistent storage is the data stored in cloud storage that is accessible on your system for your local apps.
Yes, Outlook and Office require data persistence. However, the most common configuration for virtualized environments is non-persistent host pools. Let’s dive in deeper, to clear our understanding…
For example,
You might be logging into a different VM each time, thus you get routed to a different VM in a host pool. Here’s where Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) comes handy. It mounts that storage to whatever VM you happen to log into. It looks as if the resources are being pulled from your C drive but here you know how it really happened!
The silver lining here is that non-persistent multi-user session experiences are less expensive, you get more than one user on a VM, which is very efficient.
7 Benefits of Windows Virtual Desktop For Your Organization
1. Best Remote Work Experience
According to Kate Lister, President of Global Workplace Analytics, “Our best estimate is that 25-30% of the workforce will be working-from-home multiple days a week by the end of 2021.”
Short-term planning is useful but long-term planning is very crucial for small businesses today to sustain the impact of COVID-19. Businesses who bring long term-plans into action will see better results than others.
To align your business operations with the remote work culture, you’d have to take major steps starting from implementing technologies such as WVD to get the best office-like experience with your employees.
2. State-of-the-Art Security
WVD leverages security from Azure powered by a multi-layered security stack across physical data centers and infrastructure.
Why trust Windows Virtual Desktop?
Microsoft employs more than 3500 security experts to strengthen your data security and privacy. With an investment of more than USD 1 billion annually on cybersecurity R&D, Azure has more security compliance certifications than any other cloud service provider.
With this technology, new threats are identified by analysing vast sources, including 18 billion Bing web pages, 400 billion emails, 1 billion Windows device updates, and 450 billion monthly authentications.
3. Rich Office Experience
With WVD, you can avail for benefits from both worlds—persistent and non-persistent! You can deploy Windows 10 Enterprise Multi-Session as well as have that rich office experience. The data roams with you whenever you need it.
4. Complete One Drive Access
Another benefit of WVD is with One Drive. You get complete access to One Drive in a non-persistent multi-session deployment.
You have 1 TB of storage as part of your Office 365 subscription with the data hosted in One Drive. The One Drive sync client and the Windows 10 Enterprise Multi-Session—both work together to support One Drive files-on-demand.
(One Drive files-on-demand feature allows you to save disk space and set files to always be locally available on your device)
Using this, you can set up a smaller user profile disk and let One Drive cache your most recent files. Thus, the data is always available at your fingertips.
When you want to access an on-demand file, it immediately populates the required file using Microsoft Azure Cloud Network infrastructure.
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5. Easy Migration To Cloud
Cloud doesn’t necessarily have to sound scary and overwhelming. Simplify your cloud experience while lowering costs for your Windows Server Desktops and apps.
It’s a few-step migration process to switching to the cloud with Azure Migration, where you find your apps and data all in one secure place.
6. Easy Transition To Windows 10
To ensure that your apps work seamlessly on the latest versions of your software, you get free extended security updates for your Windows 7 virtual desktop on Azure with Windows Virtual Desktop.
7. Easy Dev/Testing Environments
This is why we love to work with WVD. It enables you to develop and test scenarios under virtual developer desktops.
You can leverage this technology to quickly test .NET, UWP, and other apps without any hindrances using a comprehensive set of development and testing tools that your team can use and collaborate to deliver at cloud speed.
With competitiveness beating businesses to the ground during the economic decline due to COVID-19, speed is going to be your greatest ally in gaining an upper hand in the industry.
“Instead of telling people to wait for six months for a new feature, we can give it to them in a few weeks. Our lead cycles are getting much shorter, and we have business stakeholders involved so that our solutions are more aligned with business requirements.”
Says, Johan Krebbers, IT CTO & VP TaCIT Architecture, Shell Global Solutions International (Source)
“To sum it all up, vulnerability at the home-office is now corporate vulnerability,” stated Marcial Velez, CEO of Xperteks.
“Unfortunately, whenever we get back to normal life, it won’t be so normal, anymore,” he added, citing the expected office policies that would encourage people to adhere to staggered schedules.
