Remote computing is now the way to go

Almost all people working in today's corporate environment use computers as
their essential business tool to transact work. The IT department of the company
owns the responsibility of managing and maintaining these computers.

Today's business landscape is more competitive and changing dynamically as we
speak. Governmental compliance and security regulations are increasing. In
addition to regular employees, many Indian corporates now use outsourced workers
and also have contract staff as part of their company. Also with growing
pressures on productivity, many 'five-day week' businesses are getting back to
working on Saturdays, more round the clock shifts are happening and more
employees are working from home (telecommuters). All these add to the growing
complexity of IT management.

You also need to be prepared for emergencies and have a disaster recovery
planning to ensure business continuity. In addition to the above, your IT plans
are now tied to your business results, so you want your IT team working on
business-critical projects, and not the daily non-productive 'break/fix/virus
cleanup/maintenance activities' that can chip away their time and your
employee's productivity. All this means, you must have the right computing
infrastructure to ensure success of your business.

Centralization of client computing as a technology, wherein all employees
become remote clients while you centrally control the entire computing
infrastructure from a single point behind closed doors, ensure increased
security to assets, comply to security regulations, protect company data and IP.

Other benefits

• Business continuity insurance, irrespective of workforce being reassigned
  or relocated to different functions or locations. Since each client is
  centralized, people can share equipment, use any of the client access devices
  from any part of the organization and can access to their own data from
  wherever they want to.
• Since all the data is centralized in a data center, which has a disaster
  recovery back-up, there is no fear of losing any data thereby ensuring 100
  percent uptime for each and every employee.
• Brings down cost of support dramatically as all the hardware and software
  is managed centrally. Minimum number of IT personnel can manage maximum number
  of clients now.
• Since the control is centralized, you can now implement standards, ensure
  discipline and adherence to processes and establish best practices.
• Manage software utilization better to comply with licensing policies and
  bring down the costs.

Thanks to centralized control and clearly laid out architecture, you can now
have instant deployment of hardware assets and bring down cost of running IT
down substantially over a long lifecycle period of five years.

Some of the proven remote computing solutions that can be implemented
are-server-based computing, virtual desktop interface (VDI), blade PCs and blade
workstations. In all these implementations, the choice of front-end client
access device is a thin client which offers tremendous energy savings, consuming
less than 33 percent the power of a standard desktop, physical space savings,
very low maintenance cost, long lifecycle, no virus-related worries, big cut
down on IT department resources for deskside support as all the support and
management is done over the network centrally and finally flexibility of any
employee working from any desk.

In summary, remote computing will help increase agility of not just the IT
department, but the whole company.

P Raghuraman

(The author is Country Manager-Emerging Businesses, Personal Systems Group,
HP India)