LEARNING MADE EASY

VMware Special Edition

Modern
Digital Workspace

5 requirements
for a modern workspace

Understanding
workspace adoption

Planning the digital

workspace

Larry Miller
As modern businesses everywhere embrace
new digital strategies, it’s important to
remember that digital transformation
initiatives require more than modernizing
technology infrastructure and business
processes. Successful digital transformation
begins by creating a culture of employee
trust and empowerment that puts the
right information and tools in their hands,
wherever they are.
Evolving the digital workspace has been an
elusive challenge for IT leaders in businesses
and industries everywhere. Many of the
end-user skills, tools, and processes employed
in the digital workspace today are based
on 20-year-old, PC-based technologies.
Think about it. Despite dutifully upgrading
desktop and laptop PCs every three to
five years with faster processors, more
memory, larger hard drives, and smaller
form factors, the primary PC input device
— the QWERTY keyboard — is based on a
150-year old design originally proposed by
Morse code telegraph operators! For many
people, perhaps the most exciting “inno-
vation” that IT departments have brought
to end users in the digital workspace in
recent years has been the flat-screen
monitor.
Ironically, the most profound change in
digital workspace technology has been
driven by the end users themselves: the
“bring your own device” (BYOD) revolution.
Although many organizations have
embraced the BYOD trend, the modern
digital workspace requires more than
simply allowing employees to use their
personal mobile devices for work purposes.
New devices and form factors bring new
opportunities to transform workflows
and the way employees interact with
customers, but they also bring new risks.
IT leaders must go beyond evolving the
digital workspace. They must empower
their end users and truly re-imagine the
digital workspace. In this guide, you’ll learn
how!
From Device Management to Employee
Engagement
Until recently, enterprise IT organiza-
tions decided what apps and computing
platforms were best for employees’ work
styles. IT recommended and then eval-
uated any proposed solution before
purchasing. In the command-and-con-
trol role of both owner and operator, IT
centralized services. In return, the busi-
ness lost valuable time and flexibility. Not
anymore.
Tired of being directed to use approved
technology that doesn’t meet their expec-
tations, employees have taken matters into
their own hands. They’re now choosing
the technologies that enable them to work
better and smarter. This employee-driven
technology trend, in turn, is significantly
benefiting their businesses. Therefore,
IT needs to embrace employee and
departmental choice where possible,
to ensure that IT isn’t a bottleneck to
the business. At the same time, IT must
radically change its management model to
secure and protect information, systems,
employees, and customers.
A recent survey by Forbes Insights,
The Impact of the Digital Work-
force: A New Equilibrium of the
Digitally Transformed Enterprise,
finds companies that empower employees
with easy access to their preferred apps
and devices see measurable productivity
gains, including less time spent on manual
processes (17 percent), greater team
collaboration (16 percent), and faster
decision making (16 percent).
Five Critical Requirements for a Digital
Workspace
The increased use of company-owned
and personally owned devices to access
company information and conduct
business has led to the development
of a set of requirements that will help
companies plan and implement their
digital workspaces. The details underlying
each requirement will be unique to
your business or organization, but each
requirement must be addressed.
Here are the five critical requirements
for a digital workspace:
•P
 ut the employee experience first. This
is not a simple nod to keeping employees
in mind as you go about the business of
delivering IT. Instead, building a strong
design culture around the employee
experience is critical to meet the demands
of the business, as well as the ability
to secure corporate data. If lines of
business, teams, and individuals believe
that IT gets in the way and slows them
down, employees will avoid adopting
the tools and services designed to
protect them.
•D
 eliver applications seamlessly —
anytime, anywhere. “Any application,
anytime, anywhere” doesn’t just mean
the latest mobile app on an Android or
Apple device, but also the 12-year-old
Windows app, internally developed
Java-based apps that no longer have an
internal owner, and the old Excel macros
that no longer work in modern versions
of Office. It also includes web apps deliv-
ered internally through complex virtual
private network (VPN) tools and Soft-
ware as a Service (SaaS) apps accessible
from anywhere.
•E
 nsure consistent experiences with
device management. Modern manage-
ment is the only way to deliver consistent
experiences in a perimeter-less work
environment with real-time context of
the devices used to access the apps and
data that employees need to do their
best work. Modern management (or
unified endpoint management) helps
secure access management so there is
only one app and one place to go.
•L
 everage deep insights to manage
experience and security. IT has never
been in an ideal position to track the
adoption and usage of applications
across devices. Sure, you can run reports
and try to look back through historical
data, but these tend to be one-off efforts
that look at the past with a hit-or-miss
approach based on what information
is available across disparate platforms.
True insights from data are gained from
the ability to spot patterns and trends,
identify potential gaps in experience or
security, and recommend changes.
• Automate to succeed at any scale.
To handle the scale of a digital work-
space, automation is critical, whether
onboarding a new employee or device,
deploying apps, serving up patches and
updates, or automating remediation
steps to assure an employee’s device
is secure and compliant — all without
requiring administrators or application
owners to take manual actions.
IT must design and deliver produc-
tivity experiences that employees
will use, taking into account
the devices and form factors
employees need throughout the day and
the locations from which they need to
work, as well as providing a level of flexi-
bility and choice that will keep up with the
demands of employees and departments.
Understanding Digital Workspace
Adoption
Although desired outcomes differ across
industries, there are five common
business motivations for implementing
the digital workspace:
•G
 ain competitive advantage by
improving efficiency and service
delivery. Business leaders need a
secure and powerful platform on which
to build and rebuild business processes
that enable more effective mobile work-
forces to compete in marketplaces.
•P
 rotect brand and reputation by
increasing cybersecurity and compli-
ance. As cyberattacks, malware
(including ransomware) distribution,
 and other threats multiply across the
computing landscape, IT teams using
traditional desktop and application
management tools can’t detect, reme-
diate, and protect against data breaches
fast enough.
• Modernize IT infrastructure to reduce
capital and operational expendi-
tures. Many businesses operate on
inflexible legacy infrastructure that
can’t keep up with a mobile cloud
ecosystem composed of many device
types, platforms, users, and applica-
tions. Access to data in computing silos
(whether on-premises, or in the public
cloud infrastructure), combined with
traditional, cumbersome IT manage-
ment, impede innovation and increase
total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Improve access to resources, reducing
attrition and increasing produc-
tivity among all employees (even IT).
Businesses with extremely diverse
workforces can transform operations,
service delivery, and employee morale
by improving mobile access to resources.
Yet enterprises today struggle with how
to manage security across disparate
applications, logins, devices, and users.
•
E liminate downtime to achieve
disaster recovery and continuity
of operations goals. Without high
availability and secure remote access
to critical resources across devices and
locations, organizations face planned
and unplanned downtime challenges.
Planning the Digital Workspace
Any strategic architecture should begin
with a solid foundation. The digital work-
space includes a combination of the
following:
•
Identity access management (IAM)
enables IT to secure access to corporate
resources while also improving employee
experiences, regardless of the devices
workers are using. By providing a single
application catalog, employees have
one location to access their applications,
taking advantage of a single sign-on
(SSO) experience that removes the
friction of end-user access. Employees
gain the resources they need to be
productive while IT maintains security
and control of the environment.
• Enterprise mobility management (EMM)
is necessary to secure data across
endpoints for any organization planning
to enable remote access to applications
and content on mobile devices. With
 an EMM platform, IT can manage every
mobile aspect of the digital workspace,
including devices, operating systems,
applications, content, and more.
•
Content and application delivery
management solutions provide
consumer-grade, self-service access
to cloud, mobile, and Windows
applications, and include powerfully
integrated email, calendar, file, and
social collaboration tools that engage
employees. Onboarding new applica-
tions and new employees is easy. Once
authenticated through the digital work-
space application, users can instantly
access their personalized enterprise
application catalog where they can
subscribe to virtually any mobile, cloud,
or Windows application — from the
latest mobile cloud apps to legacy enter-
prise applications.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Micro-
soft Azure, VDI and RDSH are centrally
deployed and managed. IT can improve
efficiency, increase continuity of
operations, reduce costs, and maintain
control of applications and informa-
tion because data is not stored on the
device. This allows IT to isolate Windows
32-bit applications from untrusted or
incompatible employee devices.
Download the following guides
from VMware to help you trans-
form your business with a digital
workspace:

• Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)

and virtual application (Remote
Desktop Session Host, or RDSH)
solutions may be deployed for certain
use cases as part of a digital work-
space architecture. Whether built on
an on-premises private cloud or, now
more popularly, leveraging a service
that allows desktop virtual machines or
RDSH hosts to be deployed on-prem-
ises or in public cloud infrastructure like

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