Industry Thought Leadership

Digital Workspaces: Enabling the New Normal

May, 2020
Ashish Chouksey
Delivery Head – Infrastructure & Cloud Services

Tech Mahindra

The unprecedented spread of COVID-19 has taken the world by storm. Everyone has felt its effects, regardless of their position on the economic, political, or sociological plane. Amidst the chaos, there is a particular way in which businesses have been affected, and this includes coming to a grinding halt, in some cases. This situation has taught that agile companies need to plan for a range of exigencies to ensure business continuity.

The current situation has changed the way we operate forever & so have the enterprise demands. A few weeks back, the majority of discussions were focused on productivity & cost. But, the moment the COVID-19 wave struck, the conversation changed into accessibility, security & performance for the maximum workforce while WFH. Enterprises had tough times executing the BCP’s because it was a first time experience and the scenario simulation had never been fathomed.

Though Organizations have scrambled all the resources at their disposal, it took quite some time to re-calibrate the IT systems and to provide desired access & performance. Businesses that were successful in ensuring little to no interruption were armed with a host of technology tools that allowed them to mobilize remote working models at breakneck speed.

C-Suite Challenges in "The New Normal"
Work from home (WFH) was never experimented & implemented on this scale. And, this is going to be – The New Normal.

As businesses juggle a range of new systems priorities and challenges under the immense pressure of the pandemic crisis, the teams at the frontline have also observed numerous grey areas around People, Process & Technology and therefore, the complex and business-critical services that are handled by global operations must be reassessed and restructured to achieve desired productivity.

Provisioning WFH for entire/partial workforce would need meticulous planning, a relook to our Business Processes, Workforce Productivity, real-time decision making, sudden change in the volume & IT Systems Resilience (Capacity & Performance, NW & Sec, Monitoring etc.) & all of this would undoubtedly need additional investment.

Enterprises are going through challenging times and are under financial pressure. Yet, the ‘’CIO’’ office would be expected to achieve

  • Near 100% WFH (Build vs Buy)
  • CAPEX & TCO Reduction
  • Data Security & Regulatory Compliance
  • Enhanced User Experience
  • Innovation & Digital Transformation (Intelligent Automation, Cloud Readiness etc)

Quest for Solution to Outmaneuver Uncertainty
There is no silver bullet to overcome the current challenges at one shot, and we would need to dissect the problem and manage it in parts. The market today has plethora of solutions around WFH / remote access etc. Standard build under pay-as-you-go Model, Or Custom-built on-premise solutions. Both having their own pros and cons.
Business Challenges:

  • Higher CAPEX & TCO
  • Vendor Lock-In issues
  • Existing Investment ROI

Technical Challenges:

  • Security threat & Compliance
  • Inconsistent User Experience
  • Performance Issue (Application, Data, Device)
  • Expertise in a custom solution

To overcome the above challenges, we need the best of both worlds. Which means Flexible OPEX driven Virtual Workspace delivery, which is high of performance, secure, leverage existing investment, no vendor Lock-in, cloud-ready & achieve overall TCO reduction

Tech M Solution – WaaS NxT
Tech Mahindra R&D labs & CoE has envisaged this almost seven years back and launched its own Digital Workspace Platform ‘’WaaS NxT’’. It is designed to deliver the highest level of security using hybrid workspace delivery model that leverages Virtualization, Enterprise Mobility and Context-Aware Security. It delivers all Workspace resources as a Universal Single URL to consolidate all end-user computing services. This model will bring all services under a single window to avoid duplication of investments and improve end-user experience.

Tech Mahindra's Workspace as a Service (WaaS NxT) offer a range of benefits including the Innovative pricing models & flexibility to provide an entire suite of WaaS NxT offerings through Private OR Public Cloud (MS Azure, AWS etc)

Success Stories
US based Healthcare Insurer

  • Moved over 50,000 users to a Digital Workspace platform with WaaS NxT
  • Enabled Context Aware computing with dynamic workspaces including collaboration suite enabling users to access their workspaces anytime securely, anywhere on any device
  • Tech Mahindra owns the assets, delivery of all services and vendor management to deliver an outcome based end-to-end managed services model

Australia based banking major

  • Moved over 42,000 users to a Digital Workspace platform with WaaS NxT
  • On-demand desktops at short notice and faster on-boarding of new employees for the organization
  • Standard desktop accessible anytime, anywhere globally even from low-end devices
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