Over a year into the working from home revolution, business analysts across the world have prophesied the end of the office, as companies realize they don’t need expensive premises. Those predictions may very well come true, but until the next round of lease negotiations completes, the current transition phase leaves some tricky practical problems.
Not least among those problems is the IT manager’s struggle to reconcile the dislocation between a large proportion of their precious hardware sitting idle in the office, against the workforce in their bedrooms, often working insecurely on their own devices. If you fought a protracted internal battle to upgrade everyone to the latest swish machines, it must be frustrating to find that remote or hybrid working leaves them untouched for too much of the time.
One way around this problem is to roll out subscription-based cloud desktops to all your colleagues, so that they can access their Windows desktop wherever they are, on whichever device. However, this can prove an extremely expensive endeavour, which may not always be necessary.
Faronics Deploy is a complete workstation management solution, containing an automatic software updater, customized imaging, and much more. It makes IT managers’ lives easier in all kinds of ways, including the facility to remote into users’ desktops via RDP or VNC. Some of our canny customers have realized that the remoting functionality is a far cheaper and easier way of dealing with the current situation than buying cloud desktops.
Deploy includes very granular options when you come to set up your user profiles. Typically, customers set up sites in the software that correspond to their physical locations, for example Manchester Office, Frankfurt Office, etc. The next step is to assign IT administrators to those locations, with the appropriate permissions, so that the right people can do the right thing in the right places. What is also possible, and relevant at the moment, is to pretend that office workers are IT administrators, set each one up as a site on its own, and allow that user remote control access to their own site.
This method allows remote workers to keep one central device locked safely in the office, which they can use as their main working computer wherever they are, by remoting into it from any other device. Therefore, the problem is solved in an extremely cost-effective manner via a small part of software that does a whole lot more, rather than via expensive software that only offers cloud desktop access.
To find out more about how Faronics can help you with remote working, please join our webinar.
