Unlock the Power of Productivity: How Mac Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Can Boost Your Business

Our summary and overview of the key learnings from HP's “Hybrid Work Report 2022: The Strategic Role of Digital Workspaces"

VDI Optimism Across Industries

Hybrid work has significantly grown in popularity since the beginning of the pandemic as organizations sought to address the physical and mental-health concerns of their employee population. This way of working created new priorities for organizations of all sizes, such as maintaining company security and managing the employee experience on both home-based and personal devices. 

Remote-tech trends:

• With employees distributed across the globe, 44% of organizations are investing heavily in remoting technology.
• Of those surveyed, 45% believe the deployment of this technology will boost employee productivity.
• Another 55% believe remoting technology will benefit their business handling IT for hybrid work within their companies. 

Tools like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) provide a solution for the increased need for remoting technology, which refers to the use of virtual machines to provide and manage virtual desktop environments on a centralized server that can be deployed to end-users on request. A VDI solution provides businesses with a secured, digital workspace that optimizes remote work. Through an integrated technology framework, businesses can use VDI to deliver, manage and control centralized company desktops and other assets such as applications and data.  This means employees can access company information and daily tasks in real-time, from anywhere as long as they have a device connected to a network.

A VDI solution is essential for businesses working in a hybrid model and where employees choose their own devices. With more employees and organizational departments, such as creative and development, shifting to Mac infrastructure, a VDI solution is necessary for team and organizational collaboration. This mass implementation of Mac infrastructure among teams can be expensive and challenging to manage since IT teams have fewer tools for management and less experience with Mac. Adopting a VDI mac-centric solution can eliminate operational challenges and budgetary restraints and allow for all departments to work in conjunction.

Solving the Challenges of the Hybrid Model

Although 43% of managers reported that more than half of their staff actively uses remote desktops, many agree that the implementation and management of VDIs come with their own sets of challenges such as latency, security and fast deployment.

Performance and user experience as they relate to latency and pixilation were the top employee concerns, with 59% of survey respondents citing issues within these areas. Struggling organizations can use MacStadium’s Cloud Access to unlock superior performance across every remote desktop. The platform provides a high-performance remote desktop on dedicated Apple hardware and delivers smooth, low-latency display streams for CPU and GPU-intensive workloads. Organizations can seamlessly improve VDI performance and user experience for their employees because Cloud Access supports any creative, media or development workflows requiring macOS. With Cloud Access, these high-end need departments can work remotely in a more effective manner.

For organizations seeing issues with maintenance and management, a desktop-as-a-service solution like Orka Workspace automates these processes. For example, automatically manage desktop images for groups, then deliver the individual desktops to end users based on original images. This eliminates the need for managers to update apps or the OS for every employee. One update for the group allows all users to see updates instantly. 

Another large-scale challenge organizations face with hybrid work is company hardware management. MacStadium’s Mac remote desktop offerings entirely solve this problem and remove the task of hardware management for the 40% of survey respondents with these challenges. For example, Orka Workspace accelerates employee onboarding and offboarding by providing a Mac desktop experience to remote workers rather than shipping hardware. This allows organizations to manage users and group access with tags in a centralized admin panel, eliminate concerns about collecting expensive machines from employees after termination or completion of a contract, and spend less time ensuring individual users have updated software. 

Fixing Other Remoting Tech Challenges

When it comes to security, look for a platform that maintains several high-level security badges. Maintain control of organizational data with VDI and relational database service hardware that is internally owned and managed. Orka Workspace takes this security one step further by allowing administrators to prevent users from copying and pasting data, so it doesn’t ever leave organizationally-owned machines. 

In today’s era of innovation, it’s crucial for organizational data to move at the speed of business. It is essential for VDI solutions to be deployed quickly, so businesses can operate effectively and achieve day-to-day functions. With Cloud Access, IT teams can provide access to new users as soon as the next day, and Orka Workspace is instantaneous –– the only requirement being an admin’s approval of a user on the account. 

Embracing VDI for Effective Workspaces

IT leaders are quickly adapting to the hybrid model with 58% expecting to increase spending on remote desktops in the coming months. Growing adoption of VDI technology reinforces the need for platforms that streamline IT operations.

To remain ahead of the curve in hybrid work, it is necessary to prioritize company-wide access to remote workstations and digital workspaces through VDI. Investing in new, innovative infrastructure can replace outdated data transfers in Mac-oriented devices. MacStadium allows organizations to embrace new solutions and stream high-quality Mac desktop displays to virtually any host while safeguarding network data.

If your business requires VDI to run on Mac infrastructure, MacStadium provides a remote desktop solution, which runs in partnership with HP’s Anyware remote desktop software. Learn more about our Cloud Access and Orka Workspace hardware to streamline your business practices and optimize employee engagement and productivity.