Remote Computing is now the way to go

Almost all working people in today's corporate environment use computers as
their essential business tool to transact work. The IT department of the company
owns the responsibility of managing and maintaining these computers.

Today's business landscape is more competitive and changing dynamically as we
speak. Governmental compliance and security regulations are increasing. In
addition to regular employees, many Indian corporate now use outsourced workers
and also have contract staff as part of their company. Also with growing
pressures on productivity, many 'five-day week' businesses are getting back to
working on Saturdays, more round-the-clock shifts are happening and more
employees are working from home (telecommuters). All these add to the growing
complexity of IT management.

So its necessary for you to stay prepared for emergencies and have a disaster
recovery planning to ensure business continuity. In addition to the above, your
IT plans are now tied to your business results, so you want your IT team working
on business-critical projects, and not the daily non-productive 'break/fix/virus
cleanup/maintenance activities' that can chip away their time and your
employee's productivity. All this means that you must have the right computing
infrastructure to ensure success of your business.

Centralization of client computing as a technology, where in all employees
become remote clients while you centrally control the entire computing
infrastructure from a single point behind closed doors, ensure increased
security to assets, comply to security regulations, protect company data and IP.

P Raghuraman

Other benefits of remote computing are:

• You can get business continuity insurance, irrespective of workforce being
  reassigned or relocated to different functions or locations. Since each client
  is centralized, people can share equipments, use any of the client access
  devices from any part of the organization and can access their own data from
  anywhere.
• Since all the data is centralized in a datacenter, which has a disaster
  recovery backup, there is no fear of losing any data, thereby ensuring 100
  percent uptime for each and every employee.
• Lowers the cost of support dramatically as all the hardware and software
  is managed centrally. Through this, minimum number of IT personnel can manage
  maximum number of clients.
• Since the control is centralized, you can now implement standards, ensure
  discipline and adherence to processes and establish best practices.
• Manage software utilization better to comply with licensing policies and
  bring down the costs.
• Thanks to centralized control and clearly laid out architecture, you can
  now have instant deployment of hardware assets and bring down cost of running
  IT substantially over five years.

Some of the proven remote computing solutions that can be implemented
are-server-based computing, virtual desktop interface (VDI), blade PCs and blade
workstations. In all these implementations, the choice of front-end client
access device is a thin client which offers tremendous energy savings, consuming
less than 33 percent the power of a standard desktop, physical space savings,
low maintenance cost, long lifecycle, no virus-related worries, big cut down on
IT department resources for desk side support as all the support and management
is done over the network centrally and finally flexibility of any employee
working from any desk.

In summary, remote computing will help increase agility of not just the IT
department, but also the whole company.

(Country Manager-Emerging Businesses, Personal Systems Group, HP India)