Hello together,
Yesterday, the German Federal Government adopted new decisions on the subject of the home office in the course of the Prime Minister’s Conference.
I quote from Spiegel-Online:
The withdrawal from the workplace to the home office is to become a central building block in the fight against the Corona pandemic.Companies are therefore obliged to offer their employees work in the home office whenever possible. Only if “compelling operational reasons contradict” can this be omitted, according to the federal government’s decision on the Sars-CoV-2 Occupational Safety and Health Ordinance.
Source: Spiegel Online
Many companies have already done a lot in the first lockdown to realize a work from the home office for their employees, or there have been possibilities long ago. Especially for internationally operating companies, the home office and collaboration infrastructures have been a de facto standard for years.
But what about the average medium-sized companies?
First of all, IT professionals like to forget that most medium-sized companies do not earn their money by always having the best and newest IT infrastructure. The focus is on the production of products and services. IT is a necessary evil, which you have and only costs money.
Thus, the administrators there wrestle, if at all, with minimal budgets and outdated hardware and software. “Everything is running”!
The awakening begins.
Many companies started building infrastructures in the first lockdown to enable their employees to work from the home office.
From the purchase of laptops (the grey dusty boxes under the desk were a bit impractical to take home) to the expansion of the server landscape to the introduction of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) or Enduser Computing (EUC) solutions.
Stomping infrastructure out of the ground to allow workers to leave the home office is not done “just.” Consulting, planning, sizing, offers, delivery, hardware build, installing software, realizing VPN concepts, and making the whole thing “fly.” Weeks and months pass!
Those who have not yet acted face a problem.
On N-TV this week, I watched an interview with the CEO of a medium-sized company with 150 office employees (or was it 350?). I try to quote this from memory:
… how should I send the employees to the home office? I don’t have the servers; I would have to get them again now…
Memory quote from an interview by N-TV
You don’t need to buy extra new hardware! NetApp VDS helps.
If you are worried that you will have to purchase new hardware, especially for VDI and EUC, I would like to encourage NetApp Virtual Desktop Service.
How does it work?
NetApp VDS is a service served from the cloud. For example, you can connect NetApp VDS to your Azure Subscription and get started. NetApp VDS is based on Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) solutions in Microsoft Azure and takes over the complete orchestration of the virtual desktops and the user and authorization management for you.
The Windows desktops are then streamed to the users’ end devices. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a PC, a notebook, a tablet or a smartphone. The data remains in your company.
What do I need for this?
Since many companies already have a Microsoft Subscription for Office365, for example, the most useful way to get started here is to:
- A Microsoft Subscription for Azure
- Someone who makes me a secure connection between Azure and my On-Premises data center!
- A NetApp Cloud Account
But before I start typing down how to set up a NetApp VDS, here is the deployment guide.
And when Covid is over?
The cool thing about the NetApp VDS is that if you no longer need them, you can cancel the cloud services and have no more costs.
If you still want it, the employees can then come back to the offices and sit at the desk as usual.
Thank you for your attention. Have fun in the home office and stay healthy 😉
DerSchmitz
DISCLAIMER: This post represents my personal observations and is not official from NetApp or other authorized ones. Misinterpretations or misunderstandings reserved