Hybrid working. Delivering a remote computing experience as good as in the office.

For lots of organisations, as well as many employees, the hiatus of the last two years might appear to herald the genesis of remote working. For these businesses and individuals, prior to March 2020 working remotely will have been limited largely to the odd laptop conference call or presentation draft while in a hotel room or airport lounge, or the occasional weekend proposal or review from a home office or kitchen table.

For millions, however, it would be hard to paint a less accurate picture of the importance and experience of remote working. Across a wide spread of sectors and in a multitude of roles, ‘remote working’ has for many years constituted all or most of the work experience.

Healthcare, defence and construction, as examples, have by their natures long demanded remote working, using laptops and tablets, from employees at all levels and in a multitude of roles. What the last two years have catalysed, however, is the ubiquity of working from home across myriad other sectors in which, previously, the office was the de facto place of work.

There is no turning back. For 18 solid months, the majority of (though of course by no means all) organisations managed to sustain business pretty much as usual with collaborating employees locked down in spare bedrooms, on dining room tables or on hastily cleared dressing tables.

This pushed forward by some years the desire amongst employees to be more free to work at home, and the acceptance by employers that not only is this in many cases not detrimental to the business, but being prepared to embrace and support it has become a requirement in remaining competitive in the recruitment market.

The inevitable consequence of this shift to ‘hybrid’ (permanent flexible) working arrangements is that organisations have found themselves confronted with the need to enable the same levels of performance and security for remote working as those in place in the office.

The challenges of true ‘in-office’ performance.

It is far from unusual for users of high output computing who are working remotely to experience loss of performance – some lag between their actions on the interface and the data reflected on the screen.

Assuming it is not the user’s internet connection slowing down performance, this drop in compute power between data center and remote location is not only an annoyance and threat to productivity: it has the potential to be extremely damaging.

To achieve true hybrid working for its users, the enterprise must equip its systems to sustain performance regardless of the distance from base or impermanence of a user’s location. While it’s plain that this is vital for doctors on call or military personnel operating off-base or from remote bases, it is equally critical from the perspective of the commercial enterprise for home workers or those located at satellite offices.

It would be misleading, too, to think of all remote working as involving nothing more than a laptop. In many sectors, and many roles, employees working remotely require multiple screens capable of displaying high volumes of data – traders watching the stock market being an easy and obvious example. Similarly, in the media and entertainment sectors, remote users may need to be able to manipulate massive, high resolution data files. Film editors, motion graphics designers and those working in music production provide equally easily understood illustrations.

In such cases, users require computing systems capable of supporting four screens at 4K UHD. However, such machines are not readily available as standard in the market, and quad monitor output to this level of resolution is difficult to achieve.

Data and IP security in remote working.

Performance is not the only concern to be addressed by organisations evolving their systems to fully embrace hybrid working.

Ensuring enterprise level security – both physical and digital – poses an equal challenge. Instances in which company devices are left on trains, stolen from luggage or hotel rooms, or in which local vulnerabilities at a remote user’s location potentially enable data theft, present a threat to every organisation.

While user data and the requirements of GDPR affect many businesses, the securing of intellectual property and/or third-party owned IP in highly competitive and global landscapes will be crucial for all. Customer information; personnel details; healthcare records; bank and trading account details; accounting data; legal and contractual details; patented IP; research and development; film and TV content in development; the list is endless.

Notwithstanding the implementation of robust security protocols, human error means breaches will still occur. In many cases, workers simply lack the expertise on best practice behaviour to ensure enterprise strength security on personal devices or at remote endpoints.

The only assured solution is for the organisation to institute rigorous security protocols at the datacentre, while deploying a remote working solution hat does not require secure data to leave there to reside on vulnerably located or inadequately secured devices.

Hybrid means flexibility.

For organisations seeking to provide a platform supporting true hybrid working, one further requirement must be satisfied.

Users in any role, profession or sector require flexibility of operating systems, assuring them that the infrastructure will support in-office level remote performance across their full range of devices. Ideally, the business will want to achieve this without embarking on a complicated install program.

The solution. High performance, fully secure remote working.

With nearly 30 years’ experience in design and manufacture, facilitating datacentre centralization and remote working within the Finance, Defence, Energy and Emergency sectors, Amulet Hotkey has been ideally positioned to take on the challenges posed for business by hybrid working.

To this end, we have partnered with Dell to deliver an ultra thin-client endpoint that gives pixel perfect performance at the desktop. The Amulet Hotkey DX3240 enhances Dell’s precision 3240 compact workstation, increasing performance and security, and enabling users to access their company data centres via Teradici’s PCoIP. The DX3240 is pre-installed with Stratodesk’s No Touch OS.

The result is a solution that offers the organisation both the remote performance and assured security that form the two central requirements for a viable hybrid working solution.

With a Powerful Intel Core i5 CPU for local processing performance, the DX 3240 uses an AMD GPU to support the built in Nvida graphics capability. This enables the delivery of  high frame rate 4K/UHD graphics without loss of performance. In application, that means high resolution on up to 4-screen output.

From a security perspective, Teradici’s PCoIP means that only pixels, as opposed to actual information, ever leave the datacentre. In addition, as an ultra-thin client solution, there is no information left-over on the remote machine to create a vulnerability.

In terms of flexibility, and potential install logistics, the DX3240 is preconfigured with all those components needed for a user to be able to access and maintain performance with the corresponding data centre.

The way forward.

Hybrid working, involving more regular or permanent working from remote home locations, satellite offices and shared workspaces, marks perhaps the greatest shift in the way the organisation functions since the advent of the internet. Far from posing a problem for employers, it offers myriad possibilities and potential benefits.

Amulet Hotkey’s DX3240 offers a uniform, optimized, secure and manageable endpoint capable of enabling the overall high performance remote workstation deployment this requires, providing a rich user experience at any location, without compromise.