Remote Work Without the Pain: VDI or Laptop?

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgency of enabling employee productivity from any location and any device. To ensure business continuity, enterprises are transitioning employees to work from home (WFH).

This shift is much more than a passing trend, and remote work will remain in force long after the health crisis subsides. Smaller offices and travel restrictions will be commonplace, employees will be divided into silos, and organizations will improve their readiness for disasters and pandemics. The enablement of remote work models provides huge advantages in terms of business continuity, productivity, and operational efficiency going forward.

Remote Work Without the Pain

Work-from-home presents numerous challenges for today’s IT teams. The immediate need is to support secure remote file access. This is particularly challenging in traditional industries, such as construction, government, and manufacturing, where cloud adoption is still not prevalent. A common solution in these segments has been to set up VPNs for WFH users to securely connect to an office file server.

However, due to the high latencies and asymmetric broadband connections found in most homes (upload speed is often 10 times slower than download speed), accessing files this way is typically a clunky, slow process that hampers user productivity.

For productive work from home, enterprises need a way to extend corporate file systems to remote users with LAN-speed performance while respecting the corporate security policies.

Companies are adopting two approaches to address this challenge: VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) and physical laptops.

VDI or Laptop: What’s the Best Approach?

As usual, it depends. Different enterprises have different requirements and priorities when it comes to performance, productivity and security. Here’s a high-level summary of the main advantages and drawbacks of providing your employees with VDI, compared to personal company-issued laptops:

Advantages of VDI

VDI offers great protection against data leakage — files never reach the employee’s uncontrolled premises. Furthermore, VDI computer can be always at a controlled and known state, which is essential in certified environments as well as reducing IT burden. In comparison, with laptops, employees have more control and, by having physical access, can potentially bypass security restrictions or cause the computer to diverge from the IT-mandated state

In many applications , VDI is better performing, since VDI machines are attached to the corporate or cloud network with super-fast backbone connectivity. With private laptops, uploading large files can often be grueling for employees with slow, asymmetric Internet connection.

Another advantage of VDI is that employees can bring their own devices (BYOD) — VDI does not rely heavily on secure configuration of the endpoint device.

Advantages of Laptops

With laptops, employees can accomplish work totally off the grid — even at the beach! They are are fully productive with a slow (i.e., high latency) Internet connection — as long as the files they need are cached locally.

Laptops are also definitely preferred for employees that need a dedicated, high performance compute power all to themselves — for example developers that need to run heavy software build processes, or power users that need low-level control of their machine.

What the future holds

Looking beyond the COVID-19 crisis, we expect to see a new equilibrium based on a more distributed workforce with a heavy reliance on remote IT. The shift towards remote work models will accelerate the adoption of cloud VDI services that enhance business continuity and user productivity for distributed enterprises.

At the same time, companies will enable improved file access for remote workers using laptops — and often combine both approaches.