By Paul Ponzeka, Managing Director of Engineering at Abacus Group
One of the topics that frequently comes up when speaking with our clients in the alternative investment space is how to develop a consistent user-based experience in today's mobile centric work environment. Gone are the days of a worker sitting at the same desk five days a week for eight hours at a time. Today's users are working remotely, either at home, via their iPad at the airport or on a mobile device on their commute home. The most effective way that I've seen to give them the same consistent experience regardless of where they’re connecting from, or what device they’re on, is the make the device a terminal to their secure corporate desktop.
The best way to get that experience is through the use of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Simply put, it’s the concept of moving the physical desktop from underneath a user's desk to a virtual machine running in a data center. As you can imagine, it's not as straightforward as it sounds, but, after the heavy lifting is done, there are some great benefits of the VDI model.
With VDI, since your desktop is now in a datacenter, any device that you use to connect to it, be it your home computer, your office, your iPad or smartphone, provides you the same experience (given screen size of course). This means there’s no longer concerns about users not being trained to access the shared drive remotely, or how to launch their order management system (OMS) when from their vacation homes. It’s the same desktop, all the time.
Security these days is paramount. One of the biggest advantages to VDI is that you don’t need to poke holes in your security setup to allow users access to corporate resources remotely. Since their VDI has access to all of their corporate files and applications, you can restrict external access to just the VDI. This means your users are trained on how to access them securely, but you can put specific policies in place safeguarding the user's ability to remove data from the corporate environment.
Additionally it allows for an efficient roll out of packages and updates to an entire fleet of machines in minutes instead of days. Further, we can ensure a repeatable and secure environment for your users that meets your organization's security principles and the financial services industry’s best practices.
What happens in a disaster when your users need to work from home? How many of them have done this before and ensured they have all the apps and access they need to get on remotely? What if something is missing and they can't perform their function if the office is offline? We frequently see clients and their users scrambling to ensure they have full functionality during a DR event, which is the worst time to do it. VDI ensures that your users’ workspace is always available, and can fit into your disaster recovery plan the same way your server environment does.
Adding workstations is expensive, not just from a CapEx perspective of having to ensure you have ample equipment for new hires and if one of the pieces of equipment fails, but from the labor side. There’s cost to set up that equipment, maintain it and replace it when it ages out. With VDI operating on a scalable infrastructure, a lot of this cost is severely reduced. No longer do you need to replace a computer every three years. Instead, this happens as your service provider upgrades their underlying infrastructure. At Abacus, we upgrade to new hardware lifecycles every 12 - 16 months, which ensures you’re running on the latest and greatest. You also get the reduction in labor cost from time to market. It won't take two days to get a computer set up for a new hire, or replaced for an existing employee – that time is now turned into just hours or minutes!
Overall VDI, when done right, with the right service provider can be a great benefit to your organization's security setup, as well as your users’ workflow experience!
Our engineering team is working right now on the final testing of a fully secure VDI solution we’ll have ready to roll out to clients by the middle of this year. It will include automated security patching and updates plus the ability to deploy software with just one click, as well as user provisioning automation. And, the VDI will be contained within our secure Abacus private cloud ensuring your corporate data is always kept behind our firewall no matter where your employees access data and apps from.
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Founded in 2008, Abacus Group is an innovative, award-winning IT and Cybersecurity managed service provider offering an enterprise integrated platform specifically designed for the unique needs of the financial services industry.
