Friday, February 14, 2014

TECH/ WORKPLACE SPECIAL ............................THE VIRTUAL WORKFORCE



THE VIRTUAL WORKFORCE 

Seema Nair, HR head, Cisco India discusses the various benefits of making technology employee-friendly


    As we all know, the enterprise workplace is evolving continuously, creating new and more efficient ways of working. With the evolution of the workplace, platforms that empower productivity are also seeing constant improvements. Workforces today are diverse and geographically dispersed, including knowledge and task workers, executives, partners, consultants, offshore contractors, and distributed call centre operations, connecting from locations around the world at all times. The workforce is also increasingly mobile, conducting business in traditional offices, conference rooms, customer and partner locations, home offices, on the road, in shared workplaces, and local coffee shops.
    Imagine if you had a full, secure access to all your business data, applications, and resources from anywhere, on any device, and at any time. Many Small and Mediumsized Business (SMB) owners already do. They've extended their office networks to allow themselves, their colleagues, and employees to work from anywhere they happen to be. For modern women who aim for work-life balance and employees who want to beat the
long commute to work, virtual arrangements have proven to be particularly beneficial.
    The virtual workspace delivers a unified experience that combines virtual desktop applications, voice services and video capabilities. From an IT perspective, the virtual workspace means that it can offer an exceptionally flexible and secure workspace with a consistent, high-quality user experience. For the business leader, it provides greater flexibility to access applications, which can lead to better responsiveness and ultimately, raise worker productivity.
    In order to enable these changes, companies are investing in driving server virtualisation. First, the need for agility is rising in importance - IT staff must have flexibility in adding and moving applications. Second, business continuity and disaster recovery are gaining emphasis. By running virtual servers in multiple data centres, administrators can run apps for remote workers from back-up data centres in the event of a disaster. Finally, cost control has become very important, and server virtualisation not only reduces the number of servers required, but also reduces energy costs in the data centre. The other growth spot is in desktop virtualisation. IT staffs typically look at desktop virtualisation (and also application virtualisation) as a replacement for traditional terminal services.
ETHF140104

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