Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 33 | Page 40

TALKING business ‘‘ IT teams that need to be confident they can enable a large number of users to work remotely at the drop of a hat, the solution is ideal. As many organisations discovered, these solutions make it possible to set up a remote user in under an hour. Simplifying service provisioning with HCI and Edge IT teams are able to quickly add new nodes as the remote workforce swells by rolling out a HCI and Edge-powered VDI solution and by rolling these back again once demand drops. Designed to be managed from a central interface, IT staff can manage and scale everything – compute, storage, networking – as required from a central console. Alongside making it easy to manage backups for each individual user, the addition of Edge Computing systems to VDI solutions also gives IT teams powerful automated Disaster Recovery capabilities such as replication, file-level recovery and snapshot scheduling, which is absolutely vital in a robust business resilience strategy. Finally, Edge Computing platforms eliminate the latency and bottleneck performance issues previously associated with VDI technologies. IT teams can more easily maintain and manage growing desktop workloads, all while assuring the outstanding desktop experience that users expect. Securing the Edge Maintaining the security stance of the extended enterprise also becomes easier for IT teams using today’s modern VDI solutions. Using multifactor authentication to give users access to their email, files and applications, IT teams can remotely monitor user profiles, log users out and receive automated alerts on potentially suspicious activities. Furthermore, sensitive data always stays within the corporate network and is never exposed to employees’ private networks through a VPN connection. Similarly, BYOD strategies that eliminate any need to deploy IT to home-based employees become a risk-free option as users can securely connect to their personalised desktop using any device they choose. Reassessing the future of business resilience There are a whole host of considerations for businesses to address when it comes to protecting employees and assets should disaster strike. Maintaining business resilience while accelerating Digital Transformation has jumped to the top of many organisations’ agendas following recent experiences, and a large majority are completely re-evaluating current systems and plans in order to ensure they are best prepared for an ever-evolving threat landscape. Part of this strategy must include a watertight plan for mobilising work from home with immediate effect. Now, businesses must ensure they have platforms in place that can be relied on to deliver this for the foreseeable future. • 40 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com