While the family of technologies which make remote work possible have been developing and evolving for a long time, recent shifts have suddenly planted them in a central position of essential technology enablement for businesses. Hybrid work is now part of our daily lives, sitting on a brand new spectrum between at-home and in-person modes of productivity. In this new world, technology, culture, and personal habits are all playing catch-up in a way that can leave businesses which prioritize the employee experience feeling like they’re swinging on a pendulum between differing demands and expectations.

If you wish that your hybrid work strategy could stop reacting to trends and start building a resilient, long-term approach, you are not alone. The way to do this is to put your real users at the heart of things by creating detailed, nuanced IT user personas  and design your infrastructure around their needs.

That was the big takeaway from 91¿ì»îÁÖ and Citrix’s recent discussion panel , where our experts came together to share the latest thinking from different perspectives and specialisms about what good hybrid work looks like today. Our panelists agree that, while many businesses  have spent recent years on technological catch-up – trying to mature from VPN-based offerings to modern, secure remote access at record speed – now is the right moment to build proactively for the future.

The importance of personas is about recognizing what stays the same and what changes between different job roles. Those differences are obvious between different industries. In healthcare, for example, telehealth and connected medicine have been launched into the spotlight in recent years. However, both the data at hand and its usage in this scenario contrasts heavily with the kinds of security and assurances required by financial services businesses.

Differences can be just as stark within businesses too. A clinician working on the floor of a ward has different IT needs compared to one giving advice over a video link, and granular access to sensitive data is different for a bank’s customer services agent compared to its portfolio manager. Fully understanding these roles and mapping out their needs means that more informed and lasting decisions can be made around overcoming the technological hurdles that these situations have in common.

Here are three important benefits of starting with personas when building a hybrid workplace strategy:

1: Resource-based security

Security is a challenge that every business must reckon with when building an effective hybrid work environment, and one which might come second only to the overall employee experience. While traditional approaches have emphasized hardening devices against misuse and compromise, this is becoming more difficult in the context of a growing diversity of device types. Using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), businesses can instead focus on controlling data and application resources.

When VDI is established with well-designed personas, sensitive data can be made accessible only to those who have authorization to use it. This also keeps the data inside the well-secured central system rather than requiring tech teams to tackle the much tougher task of maintaining the highest security standards on every remote device. At the same time, this resource-based security approach simplifies users’ lives by automating access based on who they are rather than repeatedly inputting passwords.

2: Autoscaling infrastructure 

Using persona modelling also creates the potential for service improvements in other areas. A financial analyst, for instance, might spend almost all of his or her time working in everyday productivity software like Office 365, but occasionally require higher-performance computing in order to extract fresh insights from large real-time datasets.

Without well-architected virtualization, businesses are left with unsatisfactory options, such as providing employees with a device that is over-specified for most of their needs or requiring them to seek assistance from a second person to run their analysis. When a VDI deployment is aware of the employee’s workflow, the power available to them in the virtualized environment can be automatically scaled up when it is needed and scaled back down to save on costs when it is not.

3: IT management

The panel also discussed how businesses exploring VDI for hybrid work are uncovering opportunities to improve the IT workflow. In particular, AI-based service delivery management is now coming into scope as a viable option to deliver better on key objectives. With a clearer picture of what needs to be enabled for different user personas in order for the business to function well, AI tools can in fact go beyond accelerating the response to network failures and proactively eliminate problems before they interrupt productivity.

With this kind of predictive analytics, we can now begin to speak seriously about building self-healing systems which – together with user-facing tools like AI chatbots and IT quality-of-life improvements      – free up IT professionals to focus on more strategic work that delivers growth opportunities.

Virtualization has been in the industry for a long time, but the last few years have been an exponential growth phase for the technology. That process has created a real wealth of experience and insight around how VDI delivers for different sectors.

To hear more and get the full picture on persona-led hybrid work strategy, you can watch the panel discussion today.

Gopal Tadepalli
Global VDI Sales and Presales at 91¿ì»îÁÖ (Author)

Gopal Tadepalli heads Global VDI sales at 91¿ì»îÁÖ Technologies. He leads VDI practice and business development along with delivery. With more than 25 years of experience in the IT industry, he worked on End User Computing transformations such as User experience management, Digital workspace, DaaS, VDaaS, Cloud journey etc., in the last 15 years.

Mahesh Chandra
Senior Vice President and A2 Sector Head, Cloud and Infrastructure Services at 91¿ì»îÁÖ (Co-Author) 

Mahesh heads 91¿ì»îÁÖ’s Cloud and Infrastructure Business (CIS) Unit.  He looks after the growth of the CIS business within the Americas market. This includes driving overall strategy, orchestrating delivery and managing both the sales team and the Americas segment results. Mahesh also spearheads sales and client engagement on large transformation and digital programs. Under his leadership, 91¿ì»îÁÖ has been established as a leading innovation partner for this firm. 

Mahesh firmly believes that well-executed partnerships lead to more partnerships – a philosophy he uses to lead his team and achieve results for both his clients and for 91¿ì»îÁÖ.