There has been a significant cultural shift in how we work over the past few years. The COVID-19 pandemic led to rapid adoption of remote work to ensure business continuity and compliance with local mandates. With the wide availability of vaccines, businesses have been able to return to in-office work. At the same time, many businesses demonstrated high levels of productivity from remote work, lower business costs from not having everyone in the office at the same time, along with other benefits, and sought a happy middle ground in hybrid working models.
In fact, according to the HP Teradici Hybrid Work Report, 60% of respondents from across a variety of industries believe hybrid work is a strategic choice for their business. It wasn’t surprising to find that 77% of those surveyed reported their businesses were already using remoting software so employees can work from wherever they are. But what about businesses that are working primarily or exclusively in-office?
Any organization should consider adopting digital workspaces—“secured integrated technology framework that can deliver, manage and control centralized company assets, including applications, data and desktops”—whether their operations focus on work within the office, hybrid, or remote.
Picture the typical office space: desks in cubicles or booths, each kitted out with a laptop and a monitor or two, keyboards, and mouses. Employees come into the office, take their seat, login to their laptops or desktops that include all their applications, and they access the company server either directly or via a virtual private network (VPN).
But being in-office doesn’t mean being tied to a single physical desktop or office equipment. For example, what happens when a workstation crashes? What if a hybrid employee leaves their laptop at home? Either scenario could lead to hours, or even days, of lost productivity.
On the other hand, what about when employees need to collaborate but some are in-office but others are remote? How about when employees in the office need to present their work to management or clients who are located off-site?
This is where digital workspaces can be a benefit to companies that are either partly or wholly working on-premises. If the company data center and applications are hosted on a digital workspace, employees can use any device to access their work. All the company data, and the employee’s work, is already stored on the server or cloud and can be accessed by securely logging in. Leveraging digital workspaces is also integral to a company’s digital transformation strategy.
Working on-prem doesn’t mean that employees are working only on their own local PC or workstation, or just one kind of operating system (OS). Instead, an employee may need to connect to their more powerful workstation located five feet away, 50 feet away in an on-prem datacenter or server room, or sometimes 500,000 feet away in a public cloud datacenter! By accessing digital workspaces using HP Anyware, employees can enjoy the flexibility of going to any device, desk or meeting room that has network access and simply picking up where they left off. Login and you’re connected to your system and applications, as well as the OS of your host computer, without having to worry about carrying your laptop with you, while still enjoying a seamless compute experience, similar to using a workstation under one’s desk.
Companies can also consider digital workspaces, whether accessed in-office or remotely, as a disaster recovery solution. If a computer is infected, instead of costly replacements, and time lost waiting for those replacements, the computer can be wiped before the virus reaches any other systems on the server. The employee will be moved to a new system and can start working immediately once they use their credentials to login on the new laptop. You can learn more about the flexibility of accessing digital workspaces with HP Anyware by reading our customer story about Vega Cloud.
Investing in digital workspaces brings an added benefit to organizations—it reduces risks from cyberattacks. There was a significant increase in cybersecurity attacks during the pandemic, yet most organizations weren’t equipped to handle the threats. Digital workspaces that are accessed via HP Anyware, which is based on PC-over-IP (PCoIP®), keep data safe inside the network so work projects can’t be lost, stolen, or tampered with. Since data is kept in the data center, and not in end users’ devices. Even if the user loses their laptop, or suffers a cyberattack, the hacker won’t find anything to steal because the data is not physically there on the laptop, but safe in the data center. This type of secure access is enabled without requiring VPNs. AES-256 encrypted PCoIP traffic and Multifactor Authentication (MFA) add further layers of protection.
Employing digital workspaces while in-office opens a variety of collaboration opportunities. Digital workspaces solution HP Anyware includes real-time access to desktops and applications, as well as keyboard and mouse sharing for users. Employees are able to collaborate with each other without leaving their desks. No need to download and share heavy files that are less secure and take a long time to transfer, so dispersed teams can be more productive and collaborate efficiently. Because digital workspaces can be securely accessed from anywhere, users in the office can also collaborate with clients and partners who are located elsewhere.
The nature of work has changed—it is no longer tied to a place or an endpoint. Imagine having the power of your physical workstation and your peripherals wherever you go, whether it’s home, a client’s office, an event space, or even while you’re on the move.
By employing digital workspaces, businesses can be more productive and achieve the same level of compute performance as a workstation in an office no matter where employees are working from.
With HP Anyware for digital workspaces, IT teams can provision and monitor desktop and application connections to enable multiple users to access or share a digital workspace when they need it. And employees can work on virtually any device and attach multiple displays and peripherals to produce their best work from anywhere. Even when working on the most graphics-intensive applications and through variable network conditions, HP Anyware can ensure that employees do their best work in-office, at home, or anywhere else.
The digitization of business processes and systems continues to evolve. From meetings to workspaces, almost anything can now be done or managed virtually.
According to HP’s Global Head of Digital Strategy and Solutions, Ampily Vijay, digital transformation resolves employee pain points by replacing outdated applications and manual systems and “automating and simplifying repetitive processes, providing access to world class workplace devices and tools, and fostering digital ways of working,” so employees can achieve their best every day from wherever they are.
There are significant benefits to digital transformation even in the physical workspace. Virtual meetings allow businesses to communicate with partners, clients, or colleagues based outside the office. Moving systems online that were formerly done manually helps streamline workflows and improves agility. A business may not be functioning in a hybrid working model but the customers and partners they will be working with are in a hybrid environment.
As climate change, inflation and rising prices impact how people and businesses function, sustainability has come to the fore as a business priority. Digital workspaces allow businesses to share compute resources, decreasing the burden on overheads. By hosting a compute environment on a digital workspace, companies can improve energy efficiency and reduce environmental impact.
Another way to remain sustainable is to manage how long systems stay on. HP Anyware includes the Anyware Manager broker which shuts down workstations that aren’t in use, thus saving businesses time and energy, as well as keeping the data center secure.
A digital workspace can help businesses stay connected and productive in any type of environment, remote, hybrid, 100% in-office, or a combination of all.
Accessing digital workspaces using HP Anyware ensures businesses can maintain the flexibility of a hybrid work environment even in the office, while keeping company information secure in the data center. HP Anyware’s collaboration features allow employees to continue working together or with customers and partners from virtually anywhere. And with the lossless quality of PCoIP, working on a digital workspace in-office feels almost exactly like using a physical workstation.
Connect with an HP Anyware expert to learn more about how digital workspaces can benefit your business, no matter where you're working from.