Key Considerations for Enabling Remote Working and Recovery Planning

It was not so long ago that working from home was seen by many organisations as impossible. “People can’t be trusted to get stuff done” and “enabling people to work from home is too complex” are the commonest excuses we heard, but the UK lockdown forced many to rethink this attitudes to remote working.

A few months on, the positive response to remote working as a result of COVID-19 has highlighted how virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can benefit businesses. If you want to align your IT with remote work, VDI offers the solution, by running environments on VMs and delivering them to your end clients over a network.

Here are the key considerations you need to have to enable remote working and rollout your recovery plans with VDI:

Identifying critical user types

VDI is an extremely versatile remote working solution, capable of being rolled out across different use cases to different users. One of the first things you should do is identify the critical user types and workloads they will be enabling. The successful deployment of VDI to different users depends on this.

Expansion

The successful trial run of VDI to a select number of user groups will form a good base from which to expand. Your expansion plan should incorporate a digital workspace strategy, so as to evaluate your application, mobility, and connectivity needs.

Security considerations

Security is one of the biggest concerns around VDI. How can you ensure the security and integrity of a workspace over a network? One of the most important things to know is no data is stored locally on an endpoint device. The workspace is delivered over a network, but the session is conducted on the VM.

Other security considerations include:

• Ransomware
• Drive-by downloads
• Network sniffing
• Vulnerability exploits

Pay attention to sizing and capacity requirements

Capacity and sizing planning is essential to manage your VDI environment. You need to understand how data will be stored, optimise graphics and prepare for demand spikes. The performance of your virtual environments is essential to enable remote work and recovery, simplify IT management, and provide a consistent UI.