What should CIOs look for in a VDI solution?

Accops
January 28, 2021
12:04 pm

In these times of unprecedented disruption requiring realignment of short- & mid-term strategies, businesses face the challenge to achieve more with same or minimal resources. With the remote working becoming the new normal, businesses must empower their users to work from anywhere, without compromising security and privacy of corporate data while keeping the overall expenses under control. In a remote working scenario, wherein data is spread across locations and distributed endpoints are connected over internet, data security and data privacy are of paramount concerns. However, the over-emphasis on security alone often leads to increased complexities, poor user experience and increased costs. What organizations need is a simple, end-to-end solution that ensures seamless & secure remote access, improves overall employee productivity, and the last but not the least, reduces or at least maintains the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the additional business benefits.

Remote Access Challenges

Considering users’ need to access corporate applications and data remotely, especially during restrictions on movement, virtualization can be a powerful means to deliver applications and desktops anywhere, anytime, over any network.

Adopting alternative strategies like remote work or virtual office or enabling BYOD are among the top priorities for businesses today. And, when compared to VPN (virtual private network), Virtualization Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) often scores better as a remote access solution in dimensions of security and privacy

The challenge lies in achieving enterprise mobility and business agility without undermining the end-users’ experience or increasing the infrastructure complexities.

VDI vs Traditional Distributed Infrastructure

Compared to traditional end-user computing infrastructure, VDI does help reduce the burden on IT team, and improves mobility and flexibility by way of remote work and BYOD. VDI allows IT to centralize storage and endpoint management, reduce operational and hardware costs. With the traditional infrastructure, users are forced to work from fixed locations, and use only authorized devices. Also, businesses lack a simple or secure way to enable cost-effective BYOD strategies. VDI solves these problems.

But simply switching from the traditional distributed infrastructure to VDI does not solve all the problems. Typical remote working solutions used by businesses comprise VPN from one vendor, VDI from another, and strong authentication from a third, leading to increased cost and complexities. As a result, it takes more time to deploy such solutions and resolve support-related issues and get the complete problem solved

Moreover, the number of people working from home and logging into corporate applications remotely has increased manifolds in the recent times. It has increased the vulnerability and threat landscape and added to risk perception, especially for industries, like banking and healthcare, that work under various regulatory regimes. This prompts organizations to look for additional security and data leakage protection features, thereby increasing their dependency on multiple vendors.

Business Requirement

The requirement is to have a single complete solution suite that plugs all the gaps, ensuring simplicity, flexibility, control, security, and optimal TCO. It should enable businesses to quickly enable remote work and BYOD, centralize endpoint management, and reduce time to resolve support issues to improve overall user experience. Businesses can support distributed end users with fewer IT staff, reduce asset purchases and increase hardware replenishment cycles, save on real estate, energy, and other recurring costs.

Blue print for VDI based WFH solution

An ideal virtual desktop infrastructure should ensure Control, Flexibility, Simplicity, Security, Economics.

Control: Apart from device and user identification and authentication, all other security features should work seamlessly, behind the scene. User should be aware of, but not be disconcerted by, any kind of monitoring, supervision and data leak prevention measures being used by the IT team. Controls should be rigorous and deep, yet light and nimble in operations. Prevent users from keeping and accessing data or apps not required by them to perform their duties. Centralized management, software or anti-virus updates, and security patches to ensure better control, without disrupting workflow.
Flexibility: The solution should give modern-day professionals the flexibility and agility to work from anywhere, anytime, using any device and connect over any network, increasing job satisfaction and employee engagement. Also, users should be able to use any browser from their PCs or a VDI client to access published applications and their virtual desktop. Having better security does not mean binding users to any specific location or device. With a right and flexible BYOD security policy, personal devices used by employees can become a tool to boost productivity, instead of a liability.
Simplicity: Businesses need a comprehensive end-to-end solution that is quick to deploy, simple to integrate and easy to manage, delivering improved user experience and high employee performance. The reduced complexities allow IT to focus on core business activities, rather than worrying about system glitches, software updates or cyber threats. With all data and application streaming from a centralized location, IT audits become simpler and businesses can stay fully updated with respect to security and data compliance requirements.
Security: Although VDI, with its centralized provisioning and management architecture, offers better data protection than traditional infrastructure, it is critical to ensure that the VDI itself is secure. A large number of users are today accessing corporate apps and desktops remotely over insecure public networks. Thus, the solution should come with out-of-the-box security mechanisms and features to help protect the VDI, and optimize, secure and control the delivery of all enterprise services. As such, it should ensure access security, threat prevention and data protection.
Economics: The need of the hour is a comprehensive solution suite that takes care of remote access, application virtualization, desktop virtualization, MFA, identity federation, SSO and thin client needs. A multiple-vendor scenario requires IT and security teams to integrate multiple solutions to take care of access, application delivery, strong authentication, and device control requirements, resulting in increased time to deploy, complex support function and eventually increased costs.

Accops VDI provides a comprehensive, end-to-end end user computing solution, promising a hassle-free experience for end users as well as IT.

It empowers workforce to be productive from anywhere, using any device, as enterprises focus on business growth and sustainability.

With Accops VDI, business can run seamlessly with minimal IT intervention and overheads.