One of the main problems that arises with having to work from home is a lack of computers to work with. Most of the time, companies try to resolve this issue by allowing their employees to work from their home computers, hoping that they will be able to get the job done with those. Alternatively, the company will purchase a huge number of laptops as quickly as possible and set those up according to the company’s requirements.
The problem with the first solution is security and the often incorrect assumption that an employee’s home computer is capable of running all the applications they require for their work and that the employee is even willing to use their personal property for their employer’s sake. Another thing that companies need to account for is the additional workload this creates for the IT department as they are the ones that must help all the other company employees with installing all the necessary software on their home computers.
The issue with the second solution is a huge unplanned investment that most companies will not be very willing to make after looking at current economic forecasts.
A good solution for both of these issues is implementing long-distance workstations, such as Amazon WorkSpaces, which enable the company to retain ownership all of its data regardless of whether an employee is using the service from their home computer or any other device. Additionally, employees can be assigned a workstation that meets their work requirements based on their role in the company. All workstations can be interfaced with pre-existing authorisation systems, the company’s intranet and anything else they need for their work.
If an employee does not have a computer of their own at home, then the company can purchase an affordable laptop for them – the main requirement is that it can connect to the internet. Examples of laptops like this are the Chromebook or any other netbook-style laptop where all work and data is saved in a cloud.
Many global Fortune 500 companies are already using this type of solution today, which means that none of their employees have a personal computer and instead, they can grab any random Chromebook nearby and use that to log into their cloud workstation.
But as with any good thing, workstation services also have their small drawbacks which must be accounted for. Since the desktop is streamed over the internet in real-time to the user, then the user may experience latency in the graphics output. When doing regular office work, then the latency will be unnoticeable to the user even with an average connection speed. However, graphical or video editing and video games may have issues with the streaming. Hopefully, this problem will be resolved in the future, after Amazon releases its WSP protocol which will take live stream encoding to the next level.