Working from home after lock down – Digital Transformation

The lock down has swung many companies into a mandatory period of digital transformation. At SHI we have seen many ways customers have coped with various technologies to enable employees to work from home. These solutions have made many companies reconsider how vital the cost of having a physical office location for staff to attend daily really is. 

When we think about the cost of having staff situated in the office with physical machines a lot of different expenses must be considered. The cost of rent for office space in London is the highest in Europe. In the first quarter of 2020, the West End had average rents per square foot of 112.5 British pounds. The above does not include the cost of insurance, having physical machines, the back infrastructure, security and other health and safety issues that need to be considered. 

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/873480/london-office-cost-of-rent/#:~:text=The%20cost%20of%20rent%20for,annually%20than%20second%20place%20Paris. 

So, what are the alternatives? Many organisations have seen that employees can be equally productive, if not more so, while working from home. The increased employee engagement and wider talent pool that opens when you don’t require staff to travel to the office. 

Fujitsu is one of the major corporations that have recently announced a permanent work from home plan as it adapts to the ‘new normal’ and its "Work Life Shift" program will offer unprecedented flexibility to its 80,000 workers in the country of Japan. Many large scale organisations have followed suit, recent the CEO of Shopify stated on Twitter (Another newly ‘work from home as you wish’ company) - “The future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your WFH setup… COVID is challenging us all to work together in new ways.” 

If you are a Microsoft shop already, chances are you’re already licensed to work on Microsoft VDI solution. Windows Virtual Desktop is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution, which also is sometimes called "desktop-as-a-service." The service lets organizations access applications remotely that are running on top of Windows based client operating systems. Those OSes run on Microsoft Azure virtual machines housed in Microsoft's datacentres. Microsoft VDI is extremely flexible and allows you to Quickly virtualize and deploy modern and legacy desktop apps to the cloud in minutes with unified management in the Azure portal. 

A question to ask internally is what value you would giving your employees the ability to work from any location, at any time, on any device add to your business? 

SHI offers a Virtualization Desktop Infrastructure Assessment that can unlock the value of going virtual and provides the next steps of undertaking this journey. If you are interested in gaining insight into your current IT environment in advance of undertaking a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Imitative, in which SHI provides and executive summary, complete with best practice recommendations for the most effective migration process, please contact me on the below: 

Direct dial - +44 (0) 1908 685741 

Email - [email protected]