More than one year on, the COVID-19 pandemic has lasted long enough to have proven the effectiveness of remote work. Even its staunchest opponents have had to concede that working remotely is not only possible but often advantageous.
Some of their change of heart is purely circumstantial. The pandemic forced businesses that would never have considered remote work to adopt work-from-home (WFH) and hybrid workplace models like hoteling. They adapted out of necessity and soon found that it was viable.
However, there’s also a crucial technological aspect to all this. The existence of solutions like virtual private networks (VPNs) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) made it possible—at least in principle—for organizations to support their workforces as they transitioned to remote work. As recently as a decade ago, when mainstream VDI solutions were still coming of age, it would have been harder to contemplate large portions of an in-house workforce moving offsite for an extended period of time.
As a result, even larger and more established businesses who were traditionally resistant to supporting remote work have made announcements about a permanent shift. Google has already said that it will be moving to a post-pandemic hybrid model. Facebook could migrate up to half its workforce to a remote arrangement within the next decade. And even financial companies like American Express and Capital One are sticking with large-scale WFH policies until at least late 2021.
Held back by aging technology
All the same, there are still many organizations that have resisted the adoption of digital workspaces. For all the widespread change in attitudes toward remote work, and despite the fact that they themselves have embraced it (willingly or not), a fair number of companies have continued to make do with VPNs and VDI solutions.
These technologies may have matured from the state they were in ten or even twenty years ago. Yet they were never designed to support remote work on a large scale. This has serious disadvantages for organizations that put VPNs, virtual desktops or desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solutions at the center of their remote work strategy.
For instance, VPNs struggle when it comes to performance and scalability. They can also be a serious security risk. Although they do help create a secure tunnel into the corporate network, they’re still giving clients unrestricted access to all or part of that network. That’s bad news for any organization trying to adopt increasingly popular—and necessary—zero trust policies.
DaaS and VDI, on the other hand, are teeming with hidden costs. As part of a survey conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), 50% of respondents reported that more than 10 full-time employees (FTEs) were needed to oversee their VDI and DaaS solutions. Close to half of all VDI and DaaS deployments required third-party implementation services just to get things up and running.
Many organizations assume that these costs and caveats simply go with the territory. They want to be open to new workplace models and empower their remote workforces, but their receptivity and agility to change is framed by yesterday’s technologies. Fortunately, some digital workspaces offer a modern solution to this problem.
Virtual Application Delivery is ideal for large-scale remote work
Unlike VPNs and VDI/DaaS, Virtual Application Delivery (the successor to yesterday’s application virtualization technologies) arose and evolved in response to today’s challenges—cross-industry issues like mobility, security, flexibility and scalability. As a consequence, virtual app delivery platforms like Cameyo are inherently more cost-effective and secure.
- Lower costs: Virtual app delivery doesn’t require an army of FTEs for deployment and management. It also doesn’t call for huge rollouts of additional infrastructure. That small footprint and low overhead makes virtual app delivery easier to administer and much more scalable. Which all translates to far less impact on an organization’s budget.
- Higher security: Innovations like Cameyo Port Shield and Cameyo NoVPN are built right into the core of our virtual app delivery platform. By eliminating the risks that are normally associated with VPNs and VDI, these native features reduce the attack surface while also improving ease of use.
The proof of these advantages is borne out in dozens of case studies. For example:
- Brazilian software company Tático ERP switched from classic VDI to Cameyo, saying, “Citrix was very complicated to deploy and manage. And even once it was deployed, it was very heavy on our server side, and also really heavy on our users’ devices.”
- Baldwinsville Central School District in upstate New York attested to the ROI of Cameyo’s application virtualization: “In just the first year, and talking about licensing fees alone, Cameyo is saving us $50,000 compared to VMware.”
- In Scandinavia, the historic retail chain Ur&Penn highlighted Cameyo’s ease of use compared to Nutanix Xi Frame and Citrix XenApp: “Right off the bat, Cameyo doesn’t require any complex infrastructure and you don’t need to hire a third-party engineer to set it up—so that’s a huge cost savings right there.”
The urgent, pandemic-related shift to remote work has certainly made society as a whole more receptive to new workplace models. But it’s also clear that organizations and employees everywhere still have a lot to gain from digital workspace solutions like Cameyo. See how you stand to benefit from accessing business-critical apps on any device by signing up for your free trial of Cameyo today.