Productive Remote Working with AmazonWorkSpaces

Amidst COVID-19 pandemic and various health measures being taken, we are witnessing an extreme transition to remote working, and it is mostly happening unplanned. While the companies that were already leveraging flexible and scalable technology solutions are experiencing relatively smoother transitions than others, maintaining productivity in remote work environments is a top concern for almost all businesses. Providing a flexible and mobile working environment for employees to stay safe and productive in these uncertain times becomes critical for ensuring business continuity.

Improving Remote Work Performance with Amazon WorkSpaces

Remote working brings numerous challenges for businesses: How to configure all IT resources effectively? What about accessibility and security of those resources? A lot of manual work and capital investment may emerge if remote working is not properly managed, such as the challenge of meeting hardware resource needs for on-prem solutions or implementing effective security standards across the whole organization. The challenges around accessibility, operational performance, scaling, managing and securing your remote desktops and increasing costs become a huge burden for businesses of all scales during transition and most probably afterwards.

In this blog post, we will take a look at Amazon WorkSpaces, a fully-managed Desktop-as-a-Service solution offered by AWS that enables businesses access their desktops and applications remotely. With Amazon WorkSpaces, you can launch either Windows or Linux desktops, the operating system of your choice. It is a cloud-based remote desktop solution that eliminates the challenges of extending your on-premise environment to remote work conditions. Whether you are currently operating on your on-premise servers and data centers or fully adapted to the cloud, Amazon WorkSpaces enables you to provision your remote desktops and access them through the Internet regardless of your location, employee size and devices. Let’s take a look at the advantages of Amazon WorkSpaces and how it solves the challenges emerging in remote working.

Accessibility and Operational Performance

Accessibility issues in remote access might cause reduced performance due to lower availability speed. With your cloud-based remote desktops, all your employees need to access business environments fastly and efficiently is the Internet and that is all.

After you provision your remote desktops with Amazon WorkSpaces, your employees can easily download WorkSpaces client applications and access their WorkSpace from almost all types of devices such as Windows, Mac and Linux computers, Chromebooks, iPad or Android tablets, and even web browsers including Chrome or Firefox without downloading the client application. The WorkSpace remains within the cloud, so that employees have access to resources regardless of their devices. You can simply create another managed directory for users or leverage your Active Directory environment and enable your employees to use their existing credentials for accessing on-prem resources. This integration helps you ensure secure connection to your on-premise systems via VPN.

Unlimited Scalability

Amazon WorkSpaces enables you to leverage all benefits of cloud computing while working remotely. You can centrally launch your remote desktops in minutes and scale up and down when needed. The scalable nature of these remote desktops is a huge advantage considering the ever changing business environments and uncertainty. You can scale your fleet up to thousands with Amazon WorkSpaces easily without overinvesting into these unplanned resources.

Centralized Management

The cloud-based nature of Amazon WorkSpaces helps you eliminate the complexity associated with management of Virtual Desktop Infrastructures for on-premise systems and traditional desktops. You don’t have to worry about the configuration, patch management and updates of the operating systems and infrastructure management. You just launch a desktop inside Amazon Virtual Private Cloud -VPC- and empower your employees to access IT resources from anywhere and from any supported device. You can manage your desktops and configure them based on your needs and preferences such as different compute, memory and application performance needs across your teams. The scalability and central management advantages allow you to run your operations, start your projects quickly and achieve efficiency without any commitment and rapid deployment.

Cost Advantages

Based on the very nature of cloud computing, you can launch or remove your configured desktops and resources any time on-demand. You don’t have to buy or invest in maintaining hardware equipment to meet variable needs of your teams and employees, you only pay for what you actually use. Amazon WorkSpaces also provides the flexibility to choose hourly or monthly charges based on your needs. For example if all your employees are full-time remote workers that have a predictable working schedule, you can prefer fixed monthly charges for unlimited usage within the specified month. On the other hand, if your projects and required working hours are not fixed or steady, you can also prefer hourly billing, which consists of a small fixed monthly fee plus lower hourly rate for each working hour. AWS also provides switching options for pricing which allows you to be even more flexible as your needs or plans change.

Additionally, you can integrate Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer with Amazon WorkSpaces. Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer continuously analyzes customers’ service usage patterns and helps them automatically switch to the most cost effective billing option.

Security

Increased flexibility and mobility also requires businesses to take sufficient measures on organizational security and implement applicable standards to stay secure and compliant. The fact that your employees will be accessing remote desktops from various devices and networks, it becomes harder to manage security and protect your data in such a dynamic and complex environment. Amazon WorkSpaces helps you ensure no such data will be physically stored or kept in a physical computer that your business doesn't own and manage. Amazon WorkSpaces enables you to deliver and store your data in the cloud or your on-premise environment with encryption and strong security standards. All these features through PC-over-IP remote desktop protocol support you to meet your compliance requirements for strong data protection.

Amazon WorkSpaces also provides various built-in security features of cloud computing: you can enforce encryption on your storage volumes and snapshots, multi-factor authentication, implement IP address control group rules for further secure access. You can integrate your encrypted storage volumes with AWS Key Management Service for effective credential management and improve your security posture even further.

Integrated Remote Working Environment for Productivity

With all these advantages presented above, Amazon WorkSpaces empowers businesses to manage their remote working processes and never compromise productivity. Amazon WorkSpaces help you ensure your work processes are moved to online with improved collaboration and security. By this way, you can take advantage of AWS Cloud and ensure business continuity in face of unexpected market needs and uncertain work conditions. There are various AWS services enabling businesses to move their work processes online, namely Amazon WorkDocs, Amazon Chime, Amazon AppStream and many more. You can encourage collaboration between your employees while still maintaining security through Amazon Workdocs, support your online meetings and build your own virtual meeting platforms with Amazon Chime and enable management and delivery of desktop applications with Amazon Appstream. Stay safe, healthy, productive and collaborative!

Get more information from following links about AWS remote work solutions and features:

• Amazon WorkSpaces: https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces

• Amazon WorkDocs: https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs

• Amazon Chime: https://aws.amazon.com/chime

• Amazon AppStream 2.0: https://aws.amazon.com/appstream2