The coronavirus has made one thing clear: work has long ceased to be a location – it is a place where employees can work on the devices of their choice, mobile, secure and flexible.
What do we mean by a mobile and flexible workplace? The goal of a flexible workplace is to meet the challenges of the job securely, efficiently and in full – regardless of the current place of work (e.g. home office, meeting room, etc.). Especially due to COVID-19, more people are working from home – many for the first time. In some cases, this presents a new challenge not only for the workers themselves but also for employers and their infrastructures.
Traditional IT architecture approaches often fail to provide the flexibility required. The reason lies in client/server architectures that have grown over time, in which the application’s back end is provided on the server – but the front end is traditionally run on the client (i.e. the user’s workstation). However, this requires massive bandwidth to transfer data smoothly between back end and front end. Especially with performance-hungry applications, for example in CAD, healthcare or R&D, the traditional architecture quickly reaches its limits.
The following solution scenarios fully cover the needs in this area while retaining the traditional application architecture. At the same time, they guarantee complete flexibility for the workplace.
Terminal services based on the Virtual Data Center (vDC)
Workplaces with low performance demands and classic office applications can often be provided in their entirety very easily via terminal servers. During use, only the screen output is transmitted between the data center and the user – the data itself remains in the data center. Thanks to the effortless scaling (and reduction) of the Virtual Data Center service (VDC), this makes it possible to respond flexibly and very quickly to challenges such as these and to ensure that work from home is possible quickly and easily.
VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) based on the Virtual Data Center (vDC)
For performance-hungry applications or workplaces, we recommend VMware VDI services (VMware Horizon). Here, the entire workplace is packaged into a VM – which, however, continues to run in the Virtual Data Center and, if necessary, is supported in terms of graphics or computing power by GPUs (professional graphics or computing processors). This means that specific use cases such as CAD, image editing, 3D data, development scenarios, etc. can continue from the home office without restriction. Here too, the workload can be scaled up or reduced at any time for maximum flexibility.
