To say we've had a tumultuous year would be a slight understatement. In the blink of an eye, day to day operations of organizations around the world were completely disrupted as businesses had to prioritize employee safety while ensuring business continuity. Professionals suddenly found themselves thrust into working from home or other remote locations. Companies had to swiftly adapt their infrastructures to empower their workforce to remain not only productive, but secure from these locations as well.

The truth is, secure remote work was a hot topic of conversation well before the events of 2020. Businesses were already looking for ways to provide more flexibility to their workforce by empowering their employees to work anytime, anywhere they chose, while also allowing them to utilize any technology they chose.

According to a 2019 Owl Labs survey:

• 54% of U.S. workers worked remotely at least once per month
• 48% worked remotely at least once per week
• 30% worked remotely full-time

Fast-forward to today and these numbers only continue to grow. In fact, an April 2020 Gartner survey of CFOs revealed that 74% of those surveyed planned to make remote work a permanent option for relevant roles.

However, one critical factor that remains absolute is the struggle IT departments have had in keeping their remote workforce secure, both in the past and present. The answer to this quandary is the same as it's been for years: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

VDI inherently solves a majority of the vulnerabilities that lead to security breaches though a variety of ways. First and foremost is how the end users access their organization's sensitive data, but just as important is the level of control and insight these solutions give IT administrators.

Many security breaches typically stem from a threat actor gaining access to a user's endpoint, but an even great number of breaches are a direct result of utilizing insecure WiFi, transferring data from a secured endpoint to an insecure personal device, or utilizing and insecure wireless device in general.

 Fortunately, VDI solutions reduce these risks by:

• Eliminating risk of data loss or theft by hosting documents, applications and other assets in a secure datacenter requiring multi-factor authentication to access rather than locally on a user's device.
• Delivering real-time insights for IT administrators to monitor datacenter access and usage from any device in any location.
• Allow IT to grant or revoked infrastructure access to groups or individuals with ease through policy.
• Restrict the ability for users to copy and transfer data from their virtual machine to insecure external devices.
• Ensure the security of an organization's entire infrastructure, including computing, network, and data resources.

A lasting legacy of this pandemic will be the widespread adoption of remote work. New solutions to make their business resilient are on the minds of every IT leader today. What's going to allow their employees to work from anywhere at any time, while also giving their IT team the ability to maintain control and keep data controlled in the data center by policy? The answer is VDI. To find out how you can reach new levels of business resilience with a secure remote workforce powered by Cisco VDI Solutions, visit https://www.cisco.com/go/dcoffers

Resource

What is a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)?