How You Can Gain Agility and a Competitive Advantage

Most of us are familiar with traditional office setups: servers, active directory/print services, office-specific data controllers, and the expense and maintenance of high-end laptops for designers. Every few years new units need to be purchased. Like many companies in the past few years, you may have had to transition to a hybrid environment of people working from the traditional office with physical PCs and at home on a virtual private network (VPN). The VPN is less robust because of the need to connect to the employee’s workstation at the office. This hybrid environment caused hiccups for many companies.

If your office is functioning under this model, you may benefit from the agility of using cloud workstations instead.

Using cloud workstations can give you a competitive advantage from superior hiring options, having your staff work from anywhere, retaining top talent, increasing productivity, and keeping all your desktops and data secured in the cloud.

Brad Peterson, VP of Marketing at Workspot, explained that by tightly coupling the following things, you can increase productivity:

1. Applications – run on the virtual desktop, which is provided by Workspot.
2. Data – enabled and protected by Panzura, whose Global File System (FS) aids remote connectivity.
3. Users – particularly computer-aided designers and users of intensive, heavy graphics.

In the recent Digital Agility Summit session, “How a Leading Architecture Firm Gained Agility and Competitive Advantage,” the director of IT at the architecture firm Barge Design Solutions, David Ferguson, shared how his company became more agile and competitive by enabling work from anywhere. He related that the transition from physical workstations to cloud workstations worked well for his company.

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To learn more about better productivity when combining Workspot and Panzura, reach outto the experts of the Applied Software Digital Transformation Team.

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Why the Cloud

Moving things to the cloud not only increases productivity, it also makes your company more attractive to work for, since employees can have the opportunity to work from anywhere.

Peterson described one additional benefit of cloud workstations when a company moves from one office space to another. You need only have a dedicated internet connection with a firewall and access point, and you’re ready for business.

Transitioning to cloud workstations contrasts with the alternative of opening new offices with the big expense of new computer hardware and infrastructure. Connecting to cloud workstations is akin to having another office, regardless of physical location.

Why Workspot

An advantage behind Workspot cloud workstations is that Workspot manages the behind-the-scenes logistics: hardware, operating systems, upgrades, and more. Companies can scale out their need for virtual desktops on demand. Peterson said that doing so is straightforward, with the ability to start and stop as needed. You only need a secured proxy connection to run the Workspot client – there is no network traffic.

For Barge Design Solutions, Peterson explained Workspot functions on top of Azure, which has 60 regions worldwide connected by 100,000 miles of fiber and subsea cable. Workspot offers 84 regions around the world, so workstations and data can be targeted to cloud regions closest to users to reduce latency, no matter where they’re located.

Ferguson related that Barge Design Solutions was driven in its transition by bandwidth-intensive CAD designers. The company is satisfied with its transition from physical workstations to cloud workstations, recognizing better agility and greater competitive advantage.

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You can access Digital Agility Summit sessions on demand for real-world ways to make the most of your company’s digital transformation.