Because of the current COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have been considering how we could respond to a worst-case scenario where a team member is diagnosed with the virus, or company and government decisions result in a significant number of people unable to visit the office. How can your organization be prepared for these events?
People might be unable to work from the office because of the shutdown of public transport, schools or large city areas.
Having an unplanned (and sudden) large number of remote workers using established solutions such as VPN access could easily overwhelm the capacity of the office network or have unanticipated software licensing impacts. Further, some applications may be sensitive to slow response times due to VPN or firewall bottlenecks and not function as expected.
Connectivity aside, there may be issues with the physical equipment itself. Maybe a person’s computer isn’t mobile. Perhaps it has not been configured for working outside of the office. Alternatively, the person has never worked remotely and has no idea how to install, configure and use VPN software.
If a person receives a diagnosis while out of the office, they may not be able to come to the office to collect their computer. This presents logistical issues as to how a company would get the equipment to the employee safely.
From an operations point of view, having a significant number of people working from home can present problems both in terms of ticket volumes and the types of issues. In a standard workplace, workers will often ask a co-worker how to resolve something before contacting the help desk. In the work from home context, this interaction is not possible. The types of issues that a worker may request assistance on will also be different while working from home, where all the equipment and connectivity is essentially uncontrolled.
rocketwise’s LaunchCloud virtual desktop is a service that could be one part of a COVID-19 response plan.
With LaunchCloud, we no longer need to be concerned with the constraints of the physical hardware or a person’s location. In the example above if the worker cannot come into the office, they can request a virtual desktop which can be quickly and easily provisioned based on their profile, and within minutes they can connect through the a Windows computer, web browser, Android device, Apple Mac/ iPhone or iPad.
In addition to being fast and scalable, LaunchCloud has the benefit of ensuring that your corporate data always remains within your control.
While in a “normal” virtual desktop deployment scenario we need to consider bandwidth to/from the workplace, for a situation such as COVID-19 this is not an issue, as connectivity is from the remote workers home to the LaunchCloud data centers.
Of course, some things will need to be overcome; for example, how does a remote worker access voice and video through a virtual desktop? One obvious answer would be to utilize a personal device just for this, although other solutions also exist.
We have been having discussions with clients about how we can enable LaunchCloud for them. The majority of our clients have been using LaunchCloud for daily operations over the last several years.
We have prepared a rapid start offer to allow clients to quickly enable and test virtual desktop deployments, allowing them to determine if it can form part of their COVID-19 response plan.
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