Everything You Need to Know About VDI and the Connected Workforce

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Over the last two years, the business block has catapulted to a remote workforce, and that isn’t changing. Because more than 90% of professionals want to work fully remote or in a hybrid remote environment. Even without all the chaos of the last year, the workforce is changing. Millennials will make up more than 75% of the workforce in the next three years. With Baby Boomers retiring in droves and Zennials coming into the workforce, working styles are changing.

The shift to remote work has had some major advantages for employers. For instance, 77% of professionals reported higher productivity rates while working remotely. The WFH movement has also unleashed a broader talent landscape while making it easier for businesses to diversify the workforce without traditional geographic limitations. Until recently, applicants who live more than five miles away were given one third fewer callbacks according to the Harvard Business Review. That’s right, just five miles.

Now with the proliferation of work from home, even more, localized, smaller organizations are able to tap into a national talent market for tough-to-find skills. While the gig economy powered by millennials and others who have left the full-time workforce to work for themselves is constantly in collaboration with professionals across the business enterprise.

So, what does all this mean? Well, along with the inevitable Zoom fatigue, a work-from-home workforce can have its own unique challenges. Add a backdrop of supply chain delays and shortages expected to continue well into and through 2022, (including laptops), and planning a smart strategy can get pretty intimidating.

Even the technology of VDI has been revolutionized with Microsoft Windows 365 offering a robust array of benefits to the virtual workplace while helping your organization mitigate unnecessary risk with a zero-trust security focus for the organization, and avoiding the supply chain shortages. Let’s examine a few of VDI’s major benefits for the connected workforce:

Yes, we know, the obvious benefit, with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, team members can collaborate and access business resources from anywhere securely. As we covered before, remote work is the new, new normal. So, having the ability to work outside of the office—wherever that is—is mission-critical to every organization.

With an intuitive VDI solution, you can keep contractors and temp workers, (think interns, freelancers, and temp-to-hire employees), in active collaboration without risking any data loss through saves to a personal device. With a highly, available and scalable virtual machine end-user experience, you can empower all of your partners and employees with the same level of security and innovation.

One of the giant benefits of a connected workforce we haven’t covered yet is the potential for immense cost savings. Going remote can help you cut unnecessary overhead. With the majority of workplaces shifting to hybrid or fully remote models, many businesses are slimming down office space while saving on rent, utilities, furniture, supplies, and necessary upkeep. These trimmings add up to some significant savings, and with an active VDI solution in place, your entire workforce can still leverage all the same resources they would onsite in the office on your unique business cloud environment.

With a VDI solution, you can also scale faster without overburdening your IT team with no need to hire additional team members or overwork the existing ones for organizational desktop management. These time savings help keep your IT teams focused on more critical business priorities while supporting your Human Resources Team in onboarding new team members sooner.

With a crippling talent and labor shortage and rising demands, supply chain disruptions, including shortages, are anticipated to continue through 2022. Unfortunately, that makes it tougher to keep a growing workplace fully equipped with all the necessary hardware and devices, with items as basic as laptops being back-ordered for months on end.

Organizations can consider leveraging a hybrid BYOD strategy, giving employees the option to use their own PCs with a powerful VDI solution. That keeps them on the device they know and love while eliminating the inevitable hardware delays or at least providing a solution in the interim.

Now you can securely stream your windows experience—personalized apps, content, and settings included—from the Microsoft cloud to any device with your Windows 365 Enterprise Cloud PC. MicroAge cloud engineers are ready to guide you to empower more value and flexibility for your organization’s BYOD strategy, keeping your connected workforce and contractors aligned in lockstep for collaboration and peak performance. Fully managed and controlled through Endpoint Manager for device and application management.  Learn more about the future of VDI.

Jason Lane is a MicroAge Cloud Pre Sales Engineer with multiple Microsoft Certifications. Engaging client conversations with license optimization to gain technology advancement. He leads the renewals team for proactive management of contracts. With over a decade of experience in the channel and more than two decades of experience in building client relationships on desired business outcomes, Jason helps IT leaders navigate a constantly changing market landscape