Home workers need quality of service

There is no double that business leaders will factor in working from home in the calculations they are doing to lower costs as part of their on-going post pandemic recovery plans.

The latest IT spending forecast from analyst Gartner suggests that CIOs will need to put in place cost cutting measures. Gartner has forecast that worldwide IT spending will total $3.5tn (£2.8tn) in 2020, a decline of 7.3% from 2019.

However, a few interesting trends have emerged from its forecasts. Figures from Gartner show that desktop as a service (DaaS) is expected to boom, with growth of 98% predicted in 2020. John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice-president at Gartner says that DaaS is being pushed because the cloud works really well and scales up and scales out and works regardless of location. In a recent conversation with Computer Weekly he said: “DaaS is also inexpensive compared to shipping a new laptop, and you can run it on an old laptop.”

DaaS is just the next iteration of desktop virtualisation. It was never a top priority for CIOs, but with the coronavirus, and the cost cutting measures that will need to be in place, Lovelock believes, it is now a top 10 priority.

Working from home is the new office

Angus Johnston, Real Estate Leader and Partner at PwC says the pandemic has overturned the orthodox and accelerated underlying trends. “The old assumption about the primacy of travelling to and working from an office has been severely challenged. Those companies who can find ways of solving the regulatory, training and team building challenges flowing from having a dispersed workforce have the potential to achieve significant reductions in their property occupancy and associated cost.”

Assuming people who are currently working from home due to coronavirus, will continue to do so, CIOs will need to figure out how to give them a remote working experience that is as good as if their laptop was directly plugged into the Ethernet switch in the office. People’s home local area networks at home tend to suffer from bandwidth and contention issues, with family members streaming high definition video and playing online games at the same time as an important Zoom call is taking place. The work network needs to extend into the home. Staff working from home will require connectivity and quality of service that is as good as the work LAN.

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