The times, they are a-changing. Mobile computing devices not to mention BYOD and a millennial attitude mean that a substantial number of employees in enterprises now do their work away from their desks. Whether at home, in a bus, train or plane, or in their favourite coffee-shop, if there’s a Wi-Fi connection available, there’s a potential workspace in the making. But naturally enough, all this may then escape the control of the enterprise or at least partially so. For instance, how can companies then implement effective work area recovery for such nomadic workers in the event of an IT incident?
One answer to the problem is to use a desktop virtualisation technology. The exact approach may differ, but the underlying principle is to separate a logical operating system instance from the client device accessing it. Some compare desktop virtualisation to a combination of an old-fashioned mainframe paradigm with new-age user-defined computing. Users each have their own instance of the applications and desktop OS they need, but these items reside in a separate machine (often a central server). Users then access their individual instances via a thin client application. That makes desktop virtualisation an interesting proposition for tablets and smartphones too.
When the desktop virtualisation is combined with secure tunnelling, daily security is already enhanced. It also makes it possible to grant access for those users to their instances using different devices and lodged in different offices – in the event of a major upheaval or corporate disaster. Users recover the exact IT environment that they are accustomed too. If they already work from home, a disaster recovery at their employer’s site can be completely transparent for them. If they have had to change offices, they’ll need to figure out new arrangements for transport and amenities, but when they log on, everything will be just as before. So even if the times are indeed a-changing, desktop virtualisation may be the one exception (luckily) where things still stay the same.