Accelerate Business Through a Cost-Efficient Virtual Workforce
The traditional workforce model of permanent employees located in a single or small number of offices has undergone a significant transformation in recent years, accelerated by the effects of the current economic landscape. Drivers of this trend include initiatives to accelerate growth and expand into other markets, improve customer service and increase both worker and overall organizational productivity. The trend is further accelerated by the cost-saving advantages across labour, travel and facility budgets, the desire to tap a broader labour pool, and improving employee satisfaction and thus retention.
Today, workers in a single organization may span physical locations worldwide, from a financial services employee working at a remote branch office, to a doctor roaming the halls of a hospital checking on patients, to an outsourced call centre worker in an offshore location to an employee or even contractor working from home. While a virtual workforce provides many tangible benefits to organizations, it also increases the complexity of the challenges associated with delivering IT to a variety of user scenarios. The challenges include managing productivity and collaboration across various worker types, while securely delivering applications, data, communications, and support to ensure that these workers are as productive as possible, no matter where they are located. These challenges can be easily addressed if the right IT solution is put into place as a foundation for support.
The Modern Distributed Workforce
Organizations must find new ways to do more with less — cutting costs while, at the same time, better serving existing customers as well as expanding into new geographies and markets. Fuelled by a move toward more mobility, the modern work force is being forced out of the traditional office model and stepping into a new paradigm — in the field, at home, at a customer site, abroad, wherever — to take advantage of opportunity anywhere it lies.
With the potential of facility and labour cost reduction, access to a broader labour pool as well as travel and expense budget slashing, it’s no wonder many organizations are ready to embrace this new virtual workforce to make significant strides in worker, and business, productivity and satisfaction. Many see this as a chance to capture, and retain, the best talent at the best rate as well as better serve their customers—with higher response rates, better decision making and greater speed to market — ultimately positively impacting their bottom line.
A Service Delivery Architecture for the Virtual Workforce
In the increasingly competitive world of business, companies are seeking ways to find operational and cost efficiencies to attain and maintain a competitive advantage. The virtual workforce is one such solution that meets the dynamic challenges of the world in which we live. And with Citrix the IT department has the ability to deliver an architecture that readily meets the needs of the virtual workforce.
The following principles guide the creation of an architecture that can properly support the virtual workforce while maintaining productivity, security and collaboration:
- Simplicity – The environment should be easy and intuitive, requiring little, if any, training for the users.
- Performance – The system responsiveness must be similar for the virtual workforce and local users.
- Secure by design – The solution should be configured such that no access is allowed unless it has been specifically granted.
- Cost efficiencies – The environment should reduce overall costs through an integrated and optimized solution, one that is scalable to support business needs—even as needs span business continuity and disaster recovery.