To support widespread remote work over the past year, many organizations have deployed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). This technology gives organizations superior performance, improved governance and simplified flexibility. But it’s not quite the off-the-shelf solution that some IT and business leaders seem to think it is.

While it’s easy enough to buy virtual desktop licenses from a vendor, VDI is never a one-size-fits-all implementation. To get it right, organizations must evaluate and optimize their current environments — a task that often falls outside the skill sets of existing employees. Many organizations turn to CDW to help them ask the right questions, arrive at answers and hit the ground running with their VDI deployments.

Over the past year, organizations have turned to a wide array of solutions to help power remote work. One of the most effective has been virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which allows companies to centralize their IT resources and provide users with remote access to a consolidated pool of compute power.

While VDI may not be the right fit for every business, the model can provide a solid foundation to enable a remote work environment that is both powerful and secure. Here are three significant benefits that organizations can achieve through VDI.

In recent months, organizations across industries have been forced to adopt new approaches throughout their entire operations. Barbers started giving outdoor haircuts and accepting contactless payments. Schools have equipped their students and instructors with laptops, sent them home and invented new methods of teaching and learning on the fly. Sports teams have even played in empty stadiums, with professional basketball players enclosing themselves in a “bubble” for a COVID-free playoff tournament.

The pressures of the coronavirus pandemic have also led to changes in many data centers. This new business environment has forced companies to embrace modernization, especially those that may have previously lagged behind on needed changes.

Here are four ways that I’m seeing savvy IT and business leaders improve their data center infrastructure and operations through digital transformation.

When many businesses shuttered their physical offices and sent employees home in March, IT departments scrambled to scale up their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.

At the time, the priority was getting users set up with remote access to the work resources they needed as quickly as possible, so IT departments largely received a pass for skipping the time-consuming steps that would have made their environments more efficient. But now that remote work is the “new normal” for many organizations, it’s important to take a step back and optimize those virtual desktop environments.

Business and IT leaders looking to build out VDI environments that work for their organizations should follow these best practices.

Here’s a bit of good news for businesses that have made the shift to remote work: If you give your employees what they need to do their jobs, having them work from home can boost the bottom line.

How individual companies enable remote work depends on their industries and staffing, of course, but in our experience at CDW, most invest in a similar set of connectivity tools and services. Here’s a look at three of those solutions, and some thoughts on how they can help remote workers be productive.

While we at CDW are in the business of providing IT solutions and services to our customers, behind the scenes we deal with the same operational issues that other enterprises face. Earlier this year, our leadership made the decision to close our offices and arrange for all non-essential CDW coworkers to start working remotely.

Over the course of a weekend, our Information Technology teams gained firsthand knowledge of what our customers were either already going through or soon going to be. It was a tall order to tackle the enterprise networking, storage, security, collaboration and communication needs to allow 7,100 coworkers to work from home, but our teams rose to the task. Now, we’re sharing our experience with our customers.