With a workforce that’s more distributed than ever, ensuring employees have the tools they need when they need them is difficult enough. Add to that the stress of managing security for an aging fleet of corporate laptops or worse, a “bring your own device” scenario, and the end result is a high stake gamble on IT departments. Yet day after day, they persevere to keep workers around the world up and running safely and productively. Last year that was happening at the office, today it’s mostly at home, and tomorrow it’s going to be from anywhere.
One of the ways companies are enabling this transition is by keeping up with the rapid pace of innovations. Their ability to respond to the unprecedented upheaval of the past year was based largely on the engineering work they’d done before this past spring’s rapid shift to Work From Home. For instance, if they’d made investments in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solutions, assuming they had adequate bandwidth available, the shift to WFH was as simple as guiding someone to a login page. For companies where those investments weren’t in place, the road has been bumpy.
Fortunately, the rapid growth in technology over the last decade has paved a way forward. With the immense growth of options during that time, there’s a solution for virtually any IT need. Marcus J. Carey, the Founder of Threatcase and Enterprise Architect at Reliaquest summarized it in a recent Ars Technica roundtable, Finding Certainty in IT When the World is Uncertain, “It's never a good time to have a pandemic, but I do believe that we were set up pretty well.” Carey continued, “There's been more cloud, MFA, phone apps… There's tons of stuff that we have available. And if this had happened 10 years ago, we would have been in a worse place, I believe.” Understanding where and when to apply all these new solutions, however, is critical to achieving successful outcomes.
Any team that enables complex operations relies on a robust support network and an IT department is no exception. Given the vastness of the market they participate in and the endless possibilities for specialization, it’s a full-time job to stay on top of all the latest and greatest in tech—which is where a support network comes in. Colleagues collectively explore emerging technologies and trends and share insights, while trusted partners blur the line between sales and advice. A good vendor contributes helpful information, regardless of the ask. They expand networks and provide access to innovative solutions, making them more like an extension of the team, a technology partner.
One place a good technology partner can prove useful is in addressing shadow IT. Those are the systems and solutions outside of an IT team’s control. These can be personal accounts or hardware, unauthorized remote access applications, or even something as simple as someone syncing their personal photos onto their work computer. When these rogue elements aren’t incorporated into standard configurations or are running across multiple devices, they can introduce system vulnerabilities and become major headaches. The C-Suite is rightly concerned with vulnerabilities to ransomware introduced through these channels, and are turning to IT departments to provide protection. By teaming up with a solid technology partner and engineering built for purpose solutions, they can do just that. This ensures that accessing networks securely and protecting users wherever they are is simply a feature, not an accomplishment.
Features like these have clearly been a focus for Dell Technologies, which has proven to be a reliable partner with a comprehensive approach to security. Its hardware and data center solutions reflect that approach, with security starting in the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS). Each layer above that is secured independently, from the firmware to the operating environment, across data centers, and into the cloud. For companies taking advantage of Dell Technologies VDI systems, data protection is automated, resilient, and can produce a documented process for compliance and governance. It includes critical features like file recovery and restoration that allow IT departments to focus on keeping things running smoothly, even with a remote workforce.
Regardless of where an organization is on its adaptation to the new world of work, they’re going to have many of the same needs. Solutions need to be flexible and economical. Data security needs to be built in, and hardware needs to let users hit the ground running, without time-consuming and difficult setup processes. Click here to see how Dell Technologies, powered by Intel®, is meeting these challenges today.
*This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Dell Technologies and Intel.*
