In a time where many companies have had to rapidly embrace new ways to work from anywhere – from remote and home offices to in the office and on the road, Nerdio has helped to more securely and efficiently deliver user workspaces from the cloud.
Working remote isn’t new for Co-Founder Vadim, or his team at Nerdio. In fact, the company has a fully remote workforce with employees around the world putting its technology to work internally just as its customers do.
Today, Nerdio has more than two million users across its product portfolio, to easily deploy Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365. Nerdio Manager for MSP and Nerdio Manager for Enterprise add significant features and functionality on top of Microsoft’s virtual desktop services, Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365, to support faster virtual desktop deployments and more simplified management to lighten the load on IT administrators.
M.R. Rangaswami: The pandemic caused many companies to quickly re-evaluate their end-user computing strategy and employ technologies, like virtual desktops and desktop-as-a-service or DaaS, to enable employees to work from home. But now that workers are slowing going back to the office, will DaaS still be a growing trend?
Vadim Vladimirskiy: COVID-19 rapidly transformed the way we work, and think about work. Nearly overnight, employees who had never worked remotely or from home were required to do so. This has had a long-term impact on our work cultures and cultural approaches to work. Even as pandemic restrictions are being lifted, digital workers are reluctant to go back to the office.
Pew Research Center reports that two years into the pandemic 61% of workers that have a workplace outside of their home choose not to go into their workplace often citing an increase in work/life balance. Yet others still prefer to go into the office, or have the option of a hybrid workplace, so it’s the need for flexibility of work that remains constant.
All this is to say, the end user computing technology we use to keep employees productive must support every way people want to work. In the office, remote and a hybrid of both. This is the ultimate value of DaaS technology – it gives users a familiar and accessible workspace from anywhere they want to work. DaaS, particularly virtual desktops that are delivered from Microsoft Azure, will also lower operating costs, enhance security, improve business continuity and simplify management of end user computing.
These benefits far outweigh the traditional cost of end user computing where the management of physical devices can be pricey and riddled with needless overhead. DaaS was already a trending technology to improve the productivity and security of end users. The pandemic simply accelerated it.
M.R. Rangaswami: What are some of the challenges DaaS technology can help IT solve?
Vadim: Supporting the remote worker isn’t the only value of DaaS technology – even though the improved accessibility to business apps and data is the benefit many think of first. Security, lower operating costs and improved business continuity are all additional values of a DaaS computing approach.
We all know the endpoint is an enduring problem when it comes to security vulnerabilities. End users are often not prepared or educated appropriately when it comes to spotting socially engineered or phishing attacks that can increase the threat surface and provide cybercriminals an entry point into the corporate network. DaaS is the ideal solution to this security risk. Because data lives securely in infrastructure that can be better secured, protected and controlled by IT, it isn’t put at risk by the user. Added encryption and multi-factor authentication further removes security risk.
DaaS also can dramatically lower both capital and operating costs. Physical devices and clients no longer need to be as robust to operate cloud workspaces, so hardware costs are reduced and extended. Management is also much easier and can be done remotely from a central console, lowering staff and resource burdens.
Finally, when leveraging a public cloud such as Microsoft Azure, infrastructure costs and even space, power and cooling requirements of a traditional on-prem data center can be avoided, while scale can be swiftly enabled regardless of location.
Further, DaaS increases business resilience and continuity. Leveraging the cloud, enterprises achieve a much greater uptime level, drawing from the high-grade public cloud infrastructure. DaaS access to business data and apps is virtually immune to weather, disaster or even ransomware-related disasters which can often cripple the more traditional local-device based approach to end user computing.
M.R.: What will it take to make DaaS part of the new common fabric of enterprise IT?
Vadim: DaaS is already becoming a regular component of many organizations – both large and small. It will only be a matter of time before it is the de facto standard for enterprise end user computing based on the advantages outlined earlier. As the new hybrid work world continues to persist – and all indicators show that it will – IT will continue to seek ways to improve employee productivity, secure business data, and improve business continuity all while lowering capital and operating costs. DaaS is a clear solution to achieve each of these and will in time become a vital component of every enterprise environment.
M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com