Robb Henshaw is the Co-Founder and CMO at Cameyo.
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For most business leaders, this past year has required a complete overhaul of how they think, operate and enable their people to be productive and secure from anywhere. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the emergence of the "digital workspace."
Without a clear understanding of the various components of the digital workspace technology ecosystem, though, it's tough to determine which pieces are right for your business.
Let’s review the key segments of the digital workspace ecosystem so that you can better assess which solutions could help your people work from anywhere (WFX).
Virtual Desktops
Virtual desktops were traditionally one of the more common ways that large organizations delivered digital workspace technologies to end-users. Virtual desktops allow businesses to deliver a remote solution with the same look and feel of a physical desktop. As the name implies, virtual "desktops" are ideal for power users who need an entire desktop session to carry out business tasks. However, full virtual desktops are often overkill for most users who only need secure access to standard applications to remain productive.
Virtual Applications
Virtual application delivery solutions provide a way to simply and securely enable your users to access business-critical applications on any device, regardless of their location. This allows organizations to eliminate the need to provide virtual desktops to all users for application access. Instead, applications are delivered directly to remote users on any device securely via any HTML5 browser. Many organizations choose to utilize virtual application delivery for all of their users, but it is also often deployed alongside VDI to provide different users with the right level of technology based on their needs.
Secure Endpoints
Since many users are now increasingly located in edge environments, including home networks, securing endpoints and providing secure remote and hybrid work solutions are essential for cybersecurity. Secure endpoints help ensure secure remote access for all of your users by providing the capability to allow end-users to use BYOD while effectively separating insecure software environments from business-critical data. Some solutions even provide a cloud-native operating system that can run on almost any hardware platform and offers secure remote endpoints that foster productivity and security.
Collaboration Tools
As organizations have shifted to a distributed workforce where an employee's location is no longer the corporate office, in-person collaboration, meetings and other daily activities can no longer be carried out by traditional means. As the pandemic has shown, effective collaboration tools — including messaging, videoconferencing, project management tools and more — are crucial to maintaining communication between teams, employees and supervisors, and even employees and customers.
Policy And Management
With the need to align business processes and practices according to various governance guidelines, policy frameworks are essential. Policy and management solutions can monitor, troubleshoot and maintain the multiple components of the digital workspace ecosystem and can automate many of the tasks that would need to be manually carried out otherwise. This includes monitoring for issues and performance trends, and having the right troubleshooting tools and automated actions to trigger various infrastructure issues based on specific regulations.
Analytics, Monitoring And Testing
Closely related to policy and management tools, analytics, monitoring and testing solutions are crucial tools in any digital workspace environment. Capturing analytics and monitoring data is vital to having visibility to key performance indicators (KPIs) in any digital workspace, and having key analytics and monitoring data is essential for troubleshooting. Analytics, monitoring and testing of remote work environments and the components of the digital workspace ecosystem should involve capturing performance metrics for applications, logins, users' activities, compute, storage, networking and usage.
Print Management
Printing remains a business-critical function for many organizations and is key to a smooth user experience in digital workspace environments. Organizations often find that the built-in printing solutions can be less than adequate or lack the centralized management features required for providing robust print solutions for remote users that are manageable and secure. Print management solutions provide businesses with the tools needed to securely manage print devices, regardless of the type of endpoint device, in a single management interface.
Security
Security is uniquely positioned in the digital workspace ecosystem and should be a requirement for every digital workspace strategy, as well as comprising an essential layer of the ecosystem in its own right. Many remote and hybrid work environments are riddled with security configuration issues, and improper security configuration of digital workspace solutions can lead to easy and quick compromise from a cyberattack. Modern security priorities require security to be intrinsic to each and every layer of the digital workspace solutions you evaluate and choose.
Each business use case is different and may require different components of the ecosystem to empower remote and hybrid work effectively and securely. Tools and resources from organizations like the Digital Workspace Ecosystem Alliance, a vendor-agnostic consortium of technology leaders, which I am part of, including the initial industry white paper, provide valuable self-assessment tools and resources. In my next piece, I'll cover how organizations of all kinds can determine which pieces of the digital workspace puzzle are right for their business needs.
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