The Era of Workspace Continuity
Jeff Fisher ?
Customer-obsessed DaaS pioneer redefining what's possible with End User Computing (EUC) in Financial Services, Manufacturing, and Telco
There have been a few times in my work life when I've felt uniquely vindicated as a career end-user computing (EUC) professional. The first was about 10 years after I started in the EUC software space and the startup that I was working for at the time (Softricity) was acquired by Microsoft. At that moment, so much of the self-doubt around choosing an IT-oriented career path quickly vanished and I knew I had made the right personal decision. The next such experience was when I realized I was not some kind of aberration for having worked for so many different organizations (AWS is officially my 12th professional home!) The most recent validation is how I feel operating in what is now called the "hybrid workplace". I've built a productive and successful career primarily from home over the last 22 years and it's nice for this work arrangement to finally be seen as sustainable and even empowering.
Having worked this way for most of my career and being technically self-sufficient, I'm capable of effectively accessing the applications, data, and systems I need to stay productive under just about any condition. However, having also supported my fair share of family, friends, and other folks with IT-related challenges, I know that this is not the case for everyone. This reality is clear in recently collected data about the current state of employees' digital workplace experience.
Research showing that employee digital experiences are still far from satisfactory (courtesy of Qualtrics)
Why does workplace tech still get such a bad rap? I would argue that post-pandemic, a big part of this poor experience comes from disruptions in the way people work. When the majority of employees were physically in the office, it was much easier to deliver a consistent, satisfactory, and secure digital experience. However, now that hybrid work is the norm and business interruptions due to public health outbreaks/incidents and cyber attacks are on the rise, it's significantly more challenging for IT to deliver a reliable digital workspace to their employees.
For these reasons, I believe one of the most critical capabilities that IT decision-makers need to focus on when dealing with the reality of the hybrid workplace is delivering what I call "workspace continuity".
Workspace continuity is built around three key pillars:
Let's dive deeper into each of these.
Flexible workplace placement
Pre-cloud, EUC architects were extremely limited in their options for virtual workspace placement. Most organizations have a limited number of on-prem data centers and the systems hosting virtual desktops or apps need to be housed in at least two of these locations to provide redundancy. However, this model involves an inflexible commitment to specific geographies regardless of the change in employee and backend application location. Employees that are not within a specified latency of their virtual workspaces will have a poor remoting experience. Similarly, virtual desktops and apps that are not sufficiently connected to their backend systems will also perform poorly, again resulting in a subpar experience for employees. It's a catch-22.
With a cloud-native approach to virtual desktops and apps, organizations finally have a virtual "placement slider" which allows them to move their workspaces closer or farther from both users and backend systems. The global footprint of the AWS cloud inherently supports this flexible placement. Thought that region X would provide the right balance between users and backend systems but users are complaining about performance issues during acceptance testing? No worries - simply move your virtual desktops/apps to another region and test again.
Scaling capacity on-demand
In order to deal with ever-changing business requirements, IT needs to be able to scale capacity on-demand, and EUC is no different. This is especially true today where health outbreaks and incidents are becoming more commonplace as are contract and gig-working arrangements. However, like the workspace placement challenge described above, hosting virtual desktops and apps in on-prem data centers is extremely limiting when it comes to flexibly scaling environments up and down. Organizations need to size their solutions for peak demand and commit precious CapEx to do so.
Cloud-native EUC solutions change the game here too. With solutions like Amazon WorkSpaces, AppStream 2.0, and WorkSpaces Web, customers can scale up and down on-demand and only pay for what they use. Gone are the days of risky up-front investments that keep everyone in the organization up at night.
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Protecting against outages
The last major impact of a well-architected workplace continuity solution is the protection it provides again different kinds of outages. With more of our work lives dependent on technology, it's critical to ensure that all solutions (EUC included) are more highly available than ever. This has traditionally come at an excessive cost to the organization, which needed to replicate capacity across at least two on-prem data centers.
Conversely, resiliency is inherent in cloud-native EUC services like WorkSpaces and AppStream, which provide protection at multiple layers. First, all regions where these services are offered are built on AWS' well-known Availability Zone (AZ) model, which provides redundancy at the data center level. All of our EUC services also support regional failover designs which can be implemented to protect organizations against a highly unlikely regional failure. Finally, the AWS cloud enables the possibility of replicating specific virtual apps and desktops automatically across regions. All these are capabilities that are nearly impossible to cost-justify using an on-prem approach.
Get started with workplace continuity
If you are shaking your head in agreement after reading this, there are a number of resources you can access immediately to start planning your workplace continuity strategy with AWS:
Shadow IT Risk Early Warning Systems
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