Is Your IT Infrastructure Ready for Today’s Most Demanding Users?
If you depend on an engaged and energetic workforce to stay competitive, consider this sobering statistic: according to a 2016 Dell and Intel Future Workforce Study Global Report, Millennials say they’d leave a job with lagging technology.
Little wonder: the first generation born into the Digital Age has grown up immersed in technology and expects that it will continue to be there, enriching and fulfilling their lives. In addition to a modern IT environment, Millennials desire a professional culture that values innovation, collaboration and life balance. If you cannot meet those expectations, they’ll find an employer that can.
To attract and retain the star workers who are the future of your organization, it’s essential to equip them with highly responsive technology tools and a supporting infrastructure that are at least the equal of those they rely on in their personal life:
- Mobility solutions that free workers to be productive anywhere, any time, on any device
- Seamless BYOD that extends secure access and identity protection across all devices
- Anywhere/anytime access to the resources of the entire corporate network, including productivity apps like Office 365, OneDrive, G-Suite, and Google Drive.
The future workspace is digital and borderless
One way to enable such a diverse environment is through Desktop and Application Virtualization, in which apps, processing and storage functions do not reside in the device but are provided remotely by a secure data center via Internet. This enables workers to access their personal workspace on any device for greater flexibility. And, it reduces the problem of certain apps being available on one device but not another.
However, a Desktop and Application Virtualization solution must deliver a user experience as good or better than a traditional PC. Otherwise, a sluggish virtual device is more than just an annoyance – it’s an anchor dragging down productivity and morale. Thus, the success or failure of Desktop and Application Virtualization hinges on data center performance, and achieving that performance can be a daunting hurdle.
Legacy systems present a special challenge: not only are aging servers less likely to deliver top performance, they also pose difficulties for IT personnel who must implement a modernization solution while also planning for future requirements.
New data center technologies to the rescue
One answer is to consider Integrated Infrastructure Systems that are already pre-validated to simplify the upfront provisioning task of IT. Pre-validation removes the complexity of having to calculate how much performance must actually be configured – for example, how to go from serving 100 to 300 employees – because the OEM has done that work already. And, to improve the uptime that is so critical to the user experience, scale-out architectures from Integrated Infrastructure Systems allow for non-disruptive operations, ensuring that users have always-on access to their desktops and apps.
Another development improving data center performance involves flash storage. New processors in these technologies make apps run faster, while flash memory ensures the best possible infrastructure speed. For example, the Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X series combines attributes of memory and storage to provide a combination of high throughput and low latency, accelerating apps for fast caching and storage. Intel Optane SSDs enable IT architects to deploy a tiered infrastructure so that performance-heavy applications (such as Desktop Virtualization and Big Data analytics are assigned flash storage, while less performance-sensitive workloads can be served more economically.
Start planning now for tomorrow’s IT requirements
Forward-thinking organizations must continually evolve their IT capabilities – not only to achieve a competitive edge through improved productivity, but also to fulfill the support expectations of their next generation of leaders and knowledge workers, who value flexibility, life/work balance, and a collaborative environment that inspires innovation.
To help companies better understand their Millennial workforce, CompuCom offers Persona Modeling Services that identify this audience’s attitudes and expectations, so that they can tailor their technology accordingly.
Learn more about your options for implementing Desktop and Application Virtualization: take a moment to use this quick Data Center Modernization self-assessment tool. Your responses will help create a customized roadmap with useful insights and recommendations for modernizing your data center architecture to attract and retain the star performers who represent the future of your business.
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