How Digital Workspaces Benefit IT
Managing and supporting a large number of desktop and laptop workstations with
locally installed software is nobody's idea of a good time. Employees may come and
go regularly, and appropriate devices have to be supplied—and retrieved.
Keeping close tabs on desktops and laptops across numerous physical locations is
difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Each computer needs regular software
updates, patches, and additions, not to mention fixing failures, backing up data, and
providing user support. Because hardware is evolving quickly, these systems can
have a very short useful life.
But for most companies, device management is a far smaller concern than the
security risks created by hard-to-control devices with data stored locally. In 2018
alone, there were multiple reports of data breaches from laptops that were stolen or
lost. According to a recent Forbes article, "Nearly 41% of all data breach events from
2005 through 2015 were caused by lost devices."
Adopting a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy, as many companies are now
doing, only makes device management and security challenges more intractable.
Even if your company hasn't formally adopted BYOD, the reality is that employees
inevitably find ways to use their own devices to access corporate apps and data.
A digital workspace approach fits well with many companies' transformation goals,
and it addresses the challenges described above by moving a lot of the "heavy
lifting" into an enterprise or cloud datacenter:
• User applications no longer need to be installed or run locally on each computer.
• Company data remains in your datacenter or the cloud where it is much more
secure.
• If a user's device fails, the user can simply switch to a different device and pick up
where they left off.
Existing desktops and laptops don't just go on the garbage heap. Most companies
redeploy them as access points to digital workspaces. The important difference is
that the software required on each system is simpler and easier to standardize, data
is no longer stored on internal drives, and user productivity is no longer dependent
on the capabilities or reliability of a particular device. As a result, the useful lifetime
of existing desktops and laptops may be substantially extended. This is a big shift
from thinking about hardware lifecycle in the typical 3-5 year terms. As desktop
systems are retired, many companies replace them with "thin clients" or
Chromebooks that are cheap, simple, and easy to maintain.
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