The way that people work has fundamentally changed, with more employees working outside the office and sometimes on their own schedules. This shift in workplace models has been accelerated by the global pandemic. The digital workspace is the way for IT to deliver the applications and data that employees need to work across any device from any place. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is a key enabling technology for this approach to work. Organizations on the journey to IT and digital transformation are implementing VDI solutions to provide a flexible, reliable, and secure workspace for their employees.
Workers in the Financial Services Industry (FSI) have also changed the way they work, and flexibility and remote work activities are now the "new normal" for institutions like banks, brokerages, and insurance companies where this was not traditionally the case.
The FSI sector has special challenges when designing and deploying remote work solutions such as VDI. Security and business application resilience are mandatory for FSI remote workers. Financial institutions typically have multiple user types or personas within the organization, each requiring different computer desktop images that are appropriate to the user profile. These personas include front office and branch workers such as tellers or customer service representatives, knowledge workers, software developers, and securities traders who need to consume and act on multiple information sources at breakneck speeds.
So designing a high-performance, scalable, and cost-effective VDI infrastructure that can support these multiple FSI personas, as well as to meet seasonal demand spikes, provide disaster recovery (DR), and respond quickly to unexpected regional and global events or disasters is a real challenge for many financial organizations.
Some of the additional challenges that financial organizations face today include:
- Workforce empowerment—Personal technology and work-life balance is driving new and higher expectations. People need the same benefits at home as they have in their office—if they even have an office. They want faster, easier-to-use devices and applications that fit their specific needs. Technology itself has become a way to attract and retain the best talent, and so has become a differentiator.
- Complexity—Organizations that manage a large number of traditional personal computer find that the task is becoming increasingly complex. With desktop virtualization, you move applications, data, and the operating system desktop to the data center. IT can centrally manage the virtual desktop and save time and money by troubleshooting remotely instead of physically visiting each personal computer.
- Security—Organizations require the ability to control data, recover from disasters, apply policies, comply with regulations, and monitor risk. Maintaining data and application security, as well as compliance, is the leading IT concern in organizations of all sizes. Mobile office trends and bring-your-own device initiatives mean that more devices and sensitive data are out of direct IT control, increasing the risk of data theft, viruses, malware, and ransomware attacks. In addition, traditional anti-virus solutions cannot keep up with the amount of new malware that is created daily. In addition, non-security IT specialists tend to find security and compliance complex.
- Cost management—Organizations must monitor and optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) for all their workers, achieve greater utilization from infrastructure assets, and reduce energy use.
Running critical business software on virtualized platforms can lead to positive benefits, both tangible and intangible. These benefits include a better return on infrastructure investment, a quicker time-to-market (TTM) with faster software development life cycles, and the ability to dynamically meet the development requirements of users and achieve more favorable user experiences.
With virtual infrastructure, you can enable your entire workforce to be more productive while streamlining IT costs and management. With VDI solutions from Dell Technologies, you can streamline the design and implementation process and be assured you have a solution that is optimized for performance, density, and cost-effectiveness.