Hybrid work has become a popular option in many workplaces. The phenomenon of employees working remotely a few days, in the office at other times, or working from a different location altogether, is more common now than ever before. So much so, that few companies are considering going back to a completely in-person environment or entirely remote. 

Hybrid work introduces a few unique IT and employee experience challenges, which make choosing the right technology stack crucial for success. 

For example, employees may not be working near the data center, which means company information has further to travel over often-unsecured networks. For graphics-intensive workloads, such as video streaming and editing, users require the high quality they’re used to with physical workstations. And contract workers may work with multiple clients with cross-contamination of files posing a security threat. 

How can businesses successfully adopt hybrid work without compromising intellectual property (IP) and while ensuring that employees can work effectively from wherever they are? 

This is where digital workspaces come in. To learn more about what digital workspaces are and how they can benefit companies in a hybrid environment, read on. 

Digital workspaces defined

In the HP Teradici whitepaper on How to Create Secure, Collaborative and Productive Digital Workspaces, we define digital workspaces as “a secured, work-from-anywhere, integrated technology framework that can deliver, manage and control centralized company assets, including applications, data and desktops.” 

With a digital workspace, employees can work with company data any time they want, and from virtually anywhere. As long as they have a network connection, they can simply power up their device, use their credentials to log into the host agent and start working. But there are many more benefits to using digital workspaces, as outlined below. 

Benefits of digital workspaces 

There are numerous advantages to employers, users, and IT teams when implementing digital workspaces, whether your company is using a hybrid working model, is completely remote, or exclusively working on-premises. 

1. Flexibility in infrastructure choice

Digital workspaces encompass a variety of environments, both on-premises and on the cloud, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), data centres, edge, workstations, and applications, as well as endpoints, collaboration technologies, management and administrative tools, plus secure access policies and tools. 

Since digital workspaces can be deployed across various hosts and accessed by numerous endpoints, companies are afforded a great deal of flexibility in when and where their employees work from. Additionally, companies can also cut costs and boost productivity by implementing BYOD policies—bring your own device—that can connect to the digital workspace from anywhere.

2. Productivity booster

According to the HP Teradici Hybrid Work Report, 60% of businesses believe hybrid work is a strategic need for their company, with 35% more saying it would benefit their company’s workforce. However, in the same report, we learned that 59% of respondents said employee experience was negatively impacted by hybrid work due to the latency and pixelation users faced while accessing remote desktops. 

When companies access digital workspaces with remote display software, they can circumvent a lot of these technology issues and improve employee productivity. Remote access software for digital workspaces adapts to varying network bandwidths, thus reducing the latency issues employees might face. A digital workspace solution that delivers color accurate visual content also decreases pixelation so employees can have a positive user experience no matter where they are. 

3. Collaboration opportunities 

One of the biggest factors in the push to return to office has been the decreasing opportunities to collaborate while working remotely. Employees can’t walk over to each other’s desks for a quick chat and meeting fatigue takes time away from productive work. 

As we learned in our hybrid work report, 40% of companies surveyed had already reopened, with a further 24% planning to. 19% said their biggest tech hurdle was a lack of collaboration and this was consistent on the company culture side, where 20% said the decline in collaboration was an issue with hybrid work. 

Digital workspaces can effectively solve problems around collaboration by allowing users to invite others to share resources, hosts, and applications, no matter where the participants are located, in the same room, another city, or at the other side of the world. [add link to collaboration post?] 

4. Better data security 

Hybrid work poses certain challenges for IT teams. With employees working out of different locations and accessing data over unverified network connections, the security risk to company data can be huge. 

But digital workspaces that are remotely accessed via secured hosts, such as a PC-over-IP (PCoIP®) host, have in-built high security standards including multi-factor authentication (MFA). With PCoIP technology, business information remains only in the digital workspace data center, even when it’s being accessed on endpoints around the world. 

With a PCoIP host, paired with a PCoIP client on the endpoint, data is transmitted as encrypted image pixels from the server to the device. The raw data never leaves the company data center thus reducing the chances of cybersecurity attacks. 

HP Anyware, a remote access software for digital workspaces based on PCoIP, includes connection management controls so IT can monitor active connections and turn off inactive devices remotely, which helps stop malicious parties from accessing an end-user device. 

Get secured access to digital workspaces with HP Anyware 

Hybrid work isn’t going anywhere. For companies to continue working effectively and productively from wherever their employees are, implementing a digital workspaces solution is the best way forward. With powerful security protocols and high-quality user experiences, digital workspaces offer a comparative level of performance as on-premises workstations, even when employees are off-site. 

With HP Anyware* secured access to digital workspaces, companies can be productive from anywhere with a network connection and on virtually any host (cloud, data center, edge, workstation) and end-user device (PC, Mac®, laptop, tablet). Anyware future-proofs against changing infrastructure, so companies can adapt quickly to hybrid working models and be flexible in their host deployments. 

HP Anyware is based on the PCoIP remote display protocol and combines the best of Teradici CAS and ZCentral Remote Boost, two Engineering Emmy® award winning software. 

Learn more about the need for digital workspaces in hybrid environments and how to implement them for your business by downloading our Digital Workspaces whitepaper. 

*Network access required. HP Anyware supports Windows®, Linux® and MacOS® host environments and Window, Linux, MacOS, iOS®, Android®, and Chrome OS® end-user devices. For more on the system requirements for installing HP Anyware, refer to the Admin Guides at: https://docs.teradici.com/find/product/hp-anyware