Give it to me now

Forester Research characterises 29 per cent of the global workforce as ‘anytime, anywhere information workers’ - those who use three or more devices, work from multiple locations, and use many apps1.

Today’s IT users therefore increasingly expect instant downloads and easy-to-use interfaces to be available whenever and wherever they need them. To meet these expectations, IT departments within enterprises are introducing ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) policies, permitting employees to use their personally owned mobile devices to access company information and applications.

IT departments are therefore grappling with an ever more complex IT environment, fuelled by the evolving demands of IT literate users that want instant access from any device at any time. The growing desire of users to have more flexible and productive solutions, combined with IT trends such as the consumerization of IT, cloud-based technologies and hybrid end-user computing, are challenging the way nearly every enterprise IT department operates.

As the lines between personal and professional device usage become blurred, reconciling the security and compliance implications of granting users constant access to IT services becomes more difficult. How can the IT department continue to deliver secure, flexible IT services to end-users as their IT expectations evolve?

Meeting evolving user demands
While IT departments focus on their mission to fix and manage IT infrastructures, the mobility and variation of today’s workers and their devices has led to the slow disintermediation of the IT department. Historically, IT departments have dictated the corporate policies that manage access to company data and applications, which worked well enough when employees worked in their offices during set business hours. Now, a more competitive economic landscape and new technologies are changing the way we all work.

Workers today want access to enterprise IT services 24/7 from any location, and a traditional PC-based set-up simply cannot support this. To combat this problem, companies introduce new technologies with the hope that they will provide the ease-of-use and flexibility that users demand. But, problems arise when each new product requires its own set of management tools. When they are then folded into the mix, along with legacy applications and existing systems, this adds massive technical complexity to an already clunky IT environment. Managing such environments has become not just convoluted, but costly as well.

What’s on the IT department’s wish list?
It is clear that the traditional way of managing and dictating IT policies is out-of-date and out-of-touch with the daily realities of modern business. So what are the top issues IT managers are dealing with to maintain control over their IT architecture and deliver the types of services expected by today’s workers?

Providing secure access
The challenges that affect IT departments trying to maintain security and control over corporate data and apps are rooted in the extreme complexity of their multi-layered IT environments. With the vast array of applications and devices connecting to a company’s network today, IT departments have implemented security measures for a myriad of different software and platform requirements. Across several industries, such as government, finance and healthcare, more stringent regulations are being drafted and enforced that are requiring organisations to maintain better data privacy and security. IT departments are not only mandated by their own businesses to protect intellectual property, but outside regulatory pressures are also demanding that they do the same in order to remain compliant.

Increasing automation
Workers have often complained about how slow the IT department can be when responding to troubleshooting requests, while the IT department complains of having to fix the same task over and over again.

Consequently, employees who have grown used to the fast and easy service delivery of their consumer technologies will sometimes grow impatient when waiting for a response from their help desk. This results in their own attempt to fix the problem by downloading software without the IT department’s approval, or by using an alternative third-party application to complete their work. Having the ability to automate standard IT tasks in the infrastructure can therefore help reduce the amount of time and resources a company’s IT department spends on help desk calls, while minimising the security risks inherent with the usage of rogue IT applications.

Designing a flexible and personalised virtual workspace
How does a company keep control of its data and manage the critical applications while still allowing for users to work remotely, on the road, evenings and weekends, independently of their traditionally locked-down computing devices?

Over the span of one day, a user’s job role, location, and time zone can vary greatly, along with the kind of device they may be using. Their desired features, capabilities, and access requirements will therefore fluctuate drastically according to the physical setting and the hour of the day that they are attempting to access information.

This means that IT departments need to find a solution that not only provides the user with the appropriate information they need within a user-friendly interface, but one that also seamlessly integrates with a company’s existing hybrid IT infrastructure.

The path to workspace virtualization
The rising need for IT operational excellence, improved user experience, better security and increased compliance has created a perfect storm for the IT department. End-users are demanding a workplace experience that is similar to that of their consumer lifestyle – one of instant gratification. The “I want it, and I want it now” mentality has therefore left IT management searching for answers for the inevitable need for self-servicing.

In its ‘Hype Cycle for Virtualization’ report last year, Gartner, stated that: “Workspace virtualization tools are critical to making user-centric computing work”. Workspace virtualization helps businesses to deal with new IT demands such as BYOD by achieving an easy-to-manage, low-cost, automated and secure virtualized IT environment. These benefits can meet the demands of both end-users and IT managers, while also providing a foundation for the inevitable move towards more self-service within an enterprise IT environment.

With workspace virtualization, IT departments and end-users are given a lightweight, independent technology that provides context awareness and automation capabilities to its IT applications, while seamlessly integrating with an existing hybrid application delivery infrastructure.

Context awareness within the IT environment is the idea that a user’s virtual workspace can both sense, and react based on their environment. Workspaces that are context aware can provide end-users with a fully dynamic desktop environment, while allowing IT managers to retain full control and management of an organisation’s IT structure, maintaining security and regulatory compliance oversight without hands-on intervention. Such a context aware virtualized workspace therefore allows IT managers to attach rules governing computer access based on a user’s circumstances, without regard to device type, location or time of day. These restrictions can be added or removed based on a user’s context, as it changes 24/7, automatically preventing unauthorised actions by users, such as executing certain applications and using removable disks. Context aware technology can therefore automate all day-to-day tasks and combine them into run-books, saving the IT team time on about 80 per cent of manual tasks. Ultimately, this allows the IT department to introduce self-servicing, where users can request and be automatically approved for services directly, freeing up staff from constant support requests as it satisfies the ‘do-it-yourself’ urge in every modern consumer.

One example of an organisation using workspace virtualisation is Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in the UK. It uses RES Software to improve the delivery of clinical information to staff, focusing on the delivery of the right set of assets to each user, from applications and data through to printer settings, based on their context. This meant taking a more ‘just in time’ approach to delivering user settings and managing these assets as a user required them.

Ward Priestman, Director of ICT services, at Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We can now provide access to assets and applications in response to user requests faster than having to do this manually, and this is part of our overall strategy for providing IT services dynamically to our staff. We have over 3,500 staff to support, and this project is part of our approach to improving services for them all.”

In short, workspace virtualization enables enterprises to operate more efficiently while simultaneously lowering the costs of daily operations. With Gartner predicting $1,586 – $3,757 in lost productivity per corporate desktop2, that is no mean feat.

What’s more, workspace virtualization enables IT to centrally deliver, manage, and secure the key elements of a user’s computing experience, independent of work styles and devices. This also appeases some of the headaches faced by enterprises struggling with liability and compliance issues.

With a carefully deployed workspace virtualization solution, gone are the days of IT nightmares, and here to stay is a vastly more productive IT experience where the enterprise, the user and the IT department are in perfect harmony.

Reference
1 ‘2013 Mobile Workforce Adoption Trends’ by Ted Schadler,
February 4, 2013
2 Gartner’s ‘Desktop Total Cost of Ownership’