We’re seeing an increase in news articles and customer requests around enabling staff to work from home.
Due to the current global situation, many organisations are quickly looking to enable remote working to ensure their employees safety and keep them productive at the same time. This is especially true in certain organisations which provide key public services.
Some organisations issue employees with laptops and VPN technology to connect them back to the corporate network and these users can start to work remotely straight away if required. Others may already have a solution like VMware Horizon which can provide virtual apps and desktops, and they can make use of this. Some organisations though, are still using desktop PCs and obviously these are not mobile, leaving these users no remote working option. The result is they have to start looking for solutions, and fast.
So when customers start looking for a remote access solution for these kinds of users, they have a couple of options. They could consider issuing laptops but the likelihood is that this would be too slow to order,deliver and configure, and of course there’s no guarantee of delivery either with the supply chain heavily impacted by the virus chaos too.
The other option is a remote access solution such as VMware’s Horizon. This comes in a variety of versions ranging from the on premises version to Horizon Cloud. With speed of delivery super important in these circumstances, the on premises version of Horizon would probably take too long to acquire kit, setup kit and deploy, and so we are seeing more people looking at VMware’s Horizon Cloud offerings instead as they see the time to value on this as much quicker.
Whilst it’s true these can be deployed a lot quicker than the on premises equivalent, they still don’t happen overnight. Orders have to be placed, onboarding services have to be delivered and gold images have to be built before realistically users can start consuming services. Whilst this is far quicker than the on premises offering it’s still slower than some customers are hoping for.
However, there is a potentially quicker way that these kind of users could be given external access. There is a little known feature of Horizon that’s been part of the product for over 10 years that allows you to install the Horizon agent onto a physical PC and import it into Horizon. Then you can use the console to entitle a user to that desktop. All that is required as a minimum is the deployment of one Windows server and one linux server (the connection server and the unified access gateway components). With just these two components we can allow remote access to any PC with the agent installed. There is no requirement at all for any physical infrastructure at all, which helps keep down costs but also massively speeds up the time to deliver the solution.
The other significant advantage here is the user experience. Remote users are accessing the exact same PC’s they use everyday so everything looks and feels identical to how it does in the office.
Stay tuned for an in-depth guide on how to deliver physical PCs with VMware Horizon…
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