Managed services: enabling a dynamic workplace

Thuthuka Mhlongo

However, enabling true BYOD and mobility requires the cultivation of a dynamic workplace that supports this new breed of employee. Pervasive connectivity, seamless transition between working on different devices, and enterprise security are just a few considerations. Implementing and maintaining the infrastructure required to support this, is an onerous task. As a result many organisations are turning to managed service providers to provide underlying technology and solutions to enable the delivery of an agile and dynamic workplace.

Overcoming challenges

As devices such as ultrabooks, smartphones and tablets have become increasingly common in the business environment, this presents organisations with a number of challenges. Firstly, their form factor doesn't necessarily conform to the standard corporate issued device. Most are primarily designed for wireless and 3G type connectivity. In addition, the workforce using these devices may not necessarily be at situated at their desk with a fixed Local Area Network (LAN).

As such, organisations are starting to extend their Wi-Fi bandwidth, introducing hot-desking, allowing the workforce to connect and work from anywhere within the workplace. In addition, the shift towards cloud-based productivity services has further influenced the shift of a mobile workforce to BYOD. With an increasing mobile workforce and changing work styles, the workplace must be designed and be equipped to accommodate an ever-mobile workforce, delivering business services from anywhere and on any-device.

Supporting the mobile workforce

Without dedicated desks and fixed telephones, staff need access to collaboration tools such as Skype for business, WebEx amongst others providing instant messaging, voice and presence management. This ensures constant connection and collaboration between the employees despite their location.

Supporting the mobile workforce, it is recommended to substitute fat clients (where the information resides on the desktop) with thin clients (where the information resided on the server). Less energy is consumed with thin clients and this model provides employees with access to their virtualised workspaces from the cloud via these devices, enabling sharing with many and promoting collaboration.

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All line of business services, data and processing resides on a central platform\cloud, and users simply login to their work 'desktop' environment to access their work session and company data. This approach further drives the adoption of BYOD as a virtualised workspace is less depended of the end point's operating systems, creating a seamless working experience that can be accessed anywhere through an Internet connection. By storing all corporate data on centralised workspace a instead of the end point device, ensures increased data security and reduces the likelihood of data loss. This ensures confidential information is kept within the organisation and cannot fall into unauthorised users in a case of a lost or stolen device.

Delivering a dynamic workplace

Enterprise mobility services ensures business continuity and supports granting access to business services on demand. Dynamic workplace hosted services aims at reducing complexity while delivering many business benefits, with an easy to manage and dynamic service offering. Unlike the in-house or on premise VDI, where the complexity and upfront investment on infrastructure and a highly specialised and skilled team is required. A managed service provider is thus ideally poised to enable the delivery of the dynamic services from the cloud well geared for a future workplace.

Ultimately, the dynamic and future workplace is the transformation of the organisation into a much more centralised, efficient and standardised future mode of operation. This enables and best equip the workforce of the future, who will increasingly demand the ability to work seamlessly from anywhere, on any device of choice.