No matter the reason for working away from the office, as a business owner, leader or IT expert, you’ll want to know that your teams are working in the most effective and productive ways possible. We’ve all seen a lot of articles about how digital transformation goes hand in hand with more industrious working methods – less time wasted, better time used. However, we also know that changing the mindset of a whole workforce from traditional set-ups to more digital-friendly ones can cause friction and there will always be a lag in natural take-up unless encouraged or enforced.

But what if you need to make changes in the face of emergencies or to tackle unforeseen challenges? IT teams now need to safeguard the entire organisation’s productivity through homeworking tools, rather than focusing on the everyday continuity via backups and Disaster Recovery. The less structure there is in place, the harder it will be to ensure those necessary levels of productivity.

Under pressure

For many, the swift need for virtual access to desktops leads to unprecedented pressure – on you as a business leader, and your VPN. If you suddenly need a lot of your employees to use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) sessions to access their internal desktop machine, your network will feel the strain, even with a VPN concentrator. Not to mention the data security and compliance risks that increase with this kind of connection.

An alternative is to adopt desktop virtualisation using desktop as a service (DaaS). DaaS is a key technology for increasing collaboration and boosting productivity, and something which can form the cornerstone of your workplace strategy – whether in or out of the office. By virtualising the workstation, staff get secure access to desktops, data and applications from any location or device.

This creates seamless experiences for the end-user and makes it easier to work as and when staff need to. DaaS accesses the data centre rather than the corporate network, so there is little or no need to run a VPN. On top of the optimisation, because the session is cloud-based, no data is stored on the user’s local machine – reducing your security and compliance risks immediately.

Get closer, and lose the latency

For those working out of the office, one of the biggest concerns is the drop in their performance. This isn’t (necessarily) because the team is now working in their pyjamas, but more likely the network latency is causing delays between them and your on-prem resources.

It’s understandable that your staff require access to these resources at all times, but what if they were just a bit closer to get rid of the lag and make everyone more productive? This can easily be solved by moving your resources into the cloud, so that they are close to the virtual desktops or DaaS environment.

Keep it in the family

Enabled by the right processes and technology, employees can work far more efficiently and accurately. By removing the things that employees find frustrating about the workplace, employees can be more engaged in their work.

User-experience experts will tell you that with any interface, users need clarity, predictability and familiarity. It sounds so simple, but making sure your team can get up and running with a new type of technology hinges on their ability to quickly pick it up. It’s why DaaS is packaged to provide your employees with full access to all their applications and data, delivered via a familiar Windows desktop experience.

Time is money

When most think about digital transformation, they see roadmaps, staging, and worst of all – potential delays. With DaaS, it’s a step in the right direction, not a complete overhaul. Multi-tenanted DaaS platforms, like ours, are live right now, with new customers deployed in a matter of days. This immediately reduces the timescales compared to your average cloud project, allowing your business to deliver against the clock.

This allows you to get the majority of your workforce onto a home-working imitative without worry. For those who use a lot of third-party suppliers who need to login to access files that currently live on your on-prem services, or if staff need access to on-prem resources, then VPNs or a move to the cloud may be needed. But don’t think of those as a blocker, it’s about moving in the right direction.

The main thing is to look for solutions that deliver without giving you sleepless nights – whether forced remote work happens again, or needs to go on for longer. The benefits are clear, and the DaaS set-up can be consumed on a per-user, per-month basis, so you won’t be tied into costly technology that might not be needed at the current scale, in the future.