VMware Workspace One unifies reshaped digital workforces

Not so long ago, the concept of an office-bound digital workforce working almost exclusively from home was considered years away, if a possibility at all. The COVID-19 pandemic suddenly changed everything as years have been squeezed into weeks and companies have scrambled to manage employees, communications, productivity, security and the bottom line from distributed, remote environments.

Even though companies are gradually reopening their offices, it's no longer business as usual. Reconfigured offices and social distancing aside, many businesses that once operated with a large majority of employees on-site and a much smaller number working remotely now find the opposite is true. As a result, the juggling of these two work environments is more complex for IT, network managers and business leaders across every department -- from HR to marketing to finance. Under the umbrella of digital transformation, technologies like the cloud and virtualization more than ever are the ties that bind employers and employees together.

VMware has been at the forefront of these technologies for two decades, and during times of crisis, the VMware Workspace One platform has played key roles for companies in employee engagement, unified endpoint management, virtual desktop infrastructure, analytics, automation, data access and single sign-on. "As the work-from-home model becomes the norm and work itself becomes more distributed," noted VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger in a blog post, "we will continue to build infrastructure and technology solutions optimized for the workplace of the future."

In the wake of the pandemic, companies are reconsidering the necessity of their employees conducting business on-site versus working remotely. And Gelsinger, voted the top CEO for 2019 in Glassdoor's Employees' Choice Awards, is applying the same thought process to his own company's operations. "[W]e were at about 10% working from home before COVID," he said in a Financial Review interview, "and we are going to be greater than 50% of our employees doing greater than 50% of their time working from home going forward. That's a pretty big shift in a short period."

This handbook examines the accelerated transition of the digital workforce to remote environments as well as the policies and technologies, including VMware Workspace One features, that have eased that critical transformation while maintaining business continuity.

By

• Ron Karjian, Industry Editor