Agencies Rely Upon VDI as a Proven Solution for Remote Work
As agency IT leaders everywhere can attest, scaling existing infrastructure to accommodate remote workers is among the biggest challenges they’ve faced during the coronavirus pandemic. For some, however, VDI has come to the rescue — a technological answer to a potential human resources nightmare.
In Canada, for example, the IT team at Hastings Prince Edward Public Health — an agency offering services to citizens in Eastern Ontario — was able to easily move hundreds of staffers out of their offices thanks to a Nutanix VDI solution the organization already had in place. In Davenport, Iowa, where Cory Smith is CIO and CTO, the city gives credit to its own VDI platform for its successful pivot to telework in the face of the pandemic. “When we had to deal with a mass exodus of employees working from home,” Smith told GCN last June, “for us, it was pretty easy.”
That comes as no surprise to Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst for ZK Research. Calling VDI “a tried-and-true technology,” Kerravala says it’s especially attractive to state and local agencies because it essentially allows all work to continue as if employees were onsite.
“It’s just really straightforward — there’s no training involved. No matter where I’m working, if I have my computer, I have access to an exact replica of my office desktop.”
This access is made possible in one of two ways, Kerravala says. With traditional VDI technology, software is loaded to a server in an on-premises data center and end-user computers are pointed to it. The second approach, Desktop as a Service, also involves delivering desktops through the cloud, but the infrastructure is managed off-premises by a third-party service provider.
Either method comes with big benefits to process-driven government agencies in particular, Kerravala says. Concerns around software licensing and data security and compliance are ameliorated because applications are kept under agency control, while the standardization that VDI offers makes things more manageable for workers. “For a lot of these employees, their jobs are very task oriented. It’s just easier to do your work when everything looks familiar.”