Remote Work is Here to Stay

One trend that’s crystalized nine months into the global pandemic: Remote work, and specifically remote, dispersed teams, will remain a staple of the modern enterprise as companies regroup to address the future of work.

That’s according to a new report released by Teradici, maker of remote access software. The report, entitled “The Separation of Work and Place,” found that organizations plan to increase IT spending by well over 100% to support remote teams. Nearly two-thirds said they weren’t adequately prepared this time around thus would change the way they made the shift to remote work if faced with a similar event in the future.

Specific challenges cited ranged from procuring new hardware to VPN set up to assessing work-from-home policies for the new work environment and having to do so while ensuring productivity and security didn’t take a back seat, notes Ziad Lamman, vice president of product at Teradici.

“It’s not surprising companies were thrown for a loop when confronted with the massive task of moving their entire workforce to operate and work from home,” Lamman says. “The number one priority for organizations supporting a work-from-home model is to ensure that design IP and corporate data remain secure in a remote environment.”

While many companies weren’t entirely prepared, Lamman says that those that augmented their on-premise data centers with virtual workstations in the public cloud were better situated to scale up for remote work faster. “Organizations which already had remoting software or virtual workstation solution deployed were able to transition faster without worrying about transferring sensitive IP or data to the home computer,” he explains.

Across industries, the report found that remote work will be the norm for the foreseeable future. In the manufacturing and engineering/AEC sector, for example, 36% of organizations plan on less than half of their employees continuing to work from home on an on-going basis. In addition, that segment plans to increase IT spend by 118% to support remote work, including funneling resources to improve user experience and security.

Seventy-five percent of companies surveyed said they were using remote desktops, most notably to provide remote access to high-performance workstations needed to run graphics-intensive applications like animation and visual effects applications along with 3D tools.

While virtual workstation technologies like Teradici can deliver high-quality, color accurate and high-resolution pixels, there are demands for increased bandwidth and specialized peripheral support among power users in engineering or entertainment and media conducting performance-intensive workloads. In response, Teradici’s Auto-offload capabilities automatically select between CPU and GPU encoding based on the content type to minimize overall bandwidth usage, which is especially important in a home environment. “Design use cases often require the use of specialty peripherals such as a space mouse, and Teradici solutions include technology that enables these peripherals to operate remotely without experiencing the effect of latency lag,” he says. “This ensures a smooth, responsive user experience.”

Watch this video to find out more about how Teradici empowers remote work.