Regardless of the physical hardware you may be using in your office - whether it’s a tablet, a tower, or a laptop - failures with the hardware can and will happen. The unfortunate element of this is that you will likely be unable to gain access to any of the files that you might be working on during your outage which might through your entire day out of whack. Unless of course, you take advantage of the cloud, then a day’s outage might only be a few minutes or so.
For many employees and executives that primarily work on spreadsheets or presentations, the solution is pretty easy - you can just have everything sync to a file server by configuring your network to do just that. That way your files can be accessed on a backup machine after your normal device fails. True, you might be slightly behind on your work unless your failure happened right after you saved your work (and it never seems to happen that way!), but having to write a single paragraph or formula one more time is worlds better than having to start from scratch or being flat out unable to continue working. The benefits to productivity (and morale, if you are familiar with how emotionally draining losing all your work can be) simply can’t be measured. Just ensure that the solution in place is secured by IT - having employees work in unauthorized/unprotected applications can result in a bevy of additional security problems if IT isn’t aware.
Virtual desktops provide a way to take this a step further - after all, if your desktop isn’t really on your desktop, what would happen if your machine decides to crash? Next to nothing - virtual desktops based on VMWare or Citrix technology run inside a data center, so all you need to do is reconnect to your virtual machine and you will keep working from where you left off. You can even keep working if you lose your device entirely. All that needs to occur is for the employee to notify IT about the loss of the device and be issued a new machine, or be authorized to purchase one at a local retailer while changing login credentials so the old device can’t access the virtual environment.
The cloud also enables you to work with anyone else who might need to collaborate with your on your projects - imagine a team of developers with employees scattered across the globe. These developers might never physically meet each other, but that doesn't mean that they can’t view each other’s code. By using chat programs like Skype and accessing their files remotely, these workers can work on the same code and provide QA overviews or even fork the code to try different ideas to see what might work better for the final solution. Files can be shared in countless ways, and even entire environments can be replicated by cloning one developer’s environment and provisioning a new environment based on the work of the original employee.
Setting up your cloud environment for employee use will depend on what the organization needs. If you work a lot with data that is considered highly sensitive, it is probably best to use a private environment and utilize a dedicated server, or to invest in your own hardware and rent colocation space from a provider like Vault Networks. If your data isn't as sensitive and your primary concern is building and duplicating servers almost instantly, like in the developer example, then you should look at a solution like our vnCloud. vnCloud servers can have resources increased or decreased on-demand, and new servers can be built off the image of existing machines, so you can build as many identical environments as you need.
Alejandro
