With the shift to working from home, the world is facing a whole host of new challenges. Usually your home connection is calculated by your home needs, streaming Netflix, gaming or simple internet access demands.
For most workers, their home bandwidth is a vast improvement to their work one, with 300+ GB connections from cable providers, home fibre and in some locations, relying on 4G, that still produces excellent speeds.
With older children living at home to a later age, the home has become tech enabled and internet reliant. Even the older generations need a good connection to run cloud-based services like Google Home, security cameras etc (those services that have been designed to improve life.)
However, what happens when all the family start working from home? An obvious roadblock is space. Can you find space to work in an area intended to live in? Yet, people are finding spaces where they can work (away from interruption) even if it is just a bedroom, a converted utility or the kitchen table.
The next challenge comes from how to equally share that home based ‘shared bandwidth’. Even with some of the highest speed bandwidths for home service, upload speeds are severely limited. So, while you can access the cloud and your files, having multiple people in the same house doing the same thing can create a real problem.
Enter Microsoft Virtual Desktop – Now, to be clear I have always thought virtual desktops a bit clunky and limiting. However, these Windows based virtual desktops can effectively virtualize your internet consumption and turn a consumer connection to a massively scaled enterprise network.
Microsoft’s Virtual Desktop (only announced with the native word etc. installed in Jan 2020) is a lifesaver for many. The ability to login with a slow connection and have the virtual machine connect out, upload to other services (even your company’s Office 365) and process the synchronization of your files whilst offering a space to work on, is the modern organizations route to a productive home workforce.
There has been a worldwide shortage of Laptops and home PC’s while organizations try to get their teams set up to work from home – but what about the connection speeds? We all know, at least in the UK, the pain of the upgrade to home broadband, it takes weeks!
So, for staff members that you have had to Furlough due to their home connection failing to support them or worries about them not being able to contribute or worse, feeling extremely frustrated, this could be the solution.
For homeworker relationships splitting the bandwidth that you do have, could mean literally saving people’s sanity. No more shouting “who’s streaming a video” whilst you are trying to upload that proposal due in an hour!
While watching the Jeff Tepper announcements for this new breed of virtualized desktop experience back in January, it did not occur to me just how much they would be needed.
For more information on how to get started with Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop see the links below;
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/virtual-desktop
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/
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