Densification and How PolicyPak Helps

by Ali Hassan on April 7, 2020

Densification and How PolicyPak Helps

Densification: remember that word.

It is going to be a buzzword in the coming year and beyond. The current crisis that is currently engulfing the world will pass, but its aftershocks will be experienced for the coming decade.

The 9/11 crisis brought about everlasting changes to the way in which we approached air travel and airport security. The financial crisis of 2008 brought about sweeping banking reforms. The current COVID-19 crisis will bring about permanent work-related change as well.

Reanalyzing Densification

So what are the implications of this new buzzword of “Densification”?

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First and foremost, for our purposes, densification will mean the maximum capacity that should be at headquarters, one building, and/or working from home. Or collected together in other places.

Already, there are some real-world and obvious examples.

For instance, your favorite restaurant already states its maximum capacity by orders of the fire marshal. And, this number is likely to be forcibly reduced. Travelers may start questioning the logic of loading 5,000 passengers on a cruise ship for a week. In these instances, people capacity will now accommodate special distancing.

The topic of densification is also going to be discussed in boardrooms. Business cannot afford another disruption of this magnitude and scale. In the same way that network architects and building architects have gone to great lengths to design redundant resiliency in order to eliminate vulnerable points of failure, company leadership will redesign its personnel architecture as well. No longer will it be acceptable for all employees be clustered in dense capacity in one location. The Coronavirus epidemic forced employers to do just that: forcibly requiring employees to work remotely for weeks at home to keep everyone safe. What they attempted to create was a personnel mesh of massive redundancy.

Corporate is the New Bottleneck

Companies were already stepping their toes into the waters of remote work. In an article from 2017, Forbes Magazine wrote about a subject called spatial economics. Throughout history, the cost of distance determined where business locates itself. Thanks to the technology of the previous decade, we continue to witness the cost of distance in decline and the current challenges we are dealing with has reminded us of that fact. The fact is that the distance cost of a remote workspace is negligible at best. Distance has no cost.

What the Coronavirus health crisis showed us is that concentrating personnel in a dense environment becomes a point of vulnerability. By moving users to remote workspaces, companies can vastly reduce their risk exposure to disruptions such as pandemics and future threats we cannot even begin to predict.

The problem is that we created a mesh but one which still has a blaring bottleneck when it comes to desktop management. Domain-joined machines are dependent on VPN for intranet application access as well as desktop management and system policies. While VPN provides the necessary security for application workload access, most organizations are saddled by limited hardware capacity and VPN software licensing. VPN systems that were designed for 10 to 20 percent of the employee population were overloaded instantly. What’s more, “thick client” VDI solutions were not designed to service high-latency remote connections. Because the vast majority of remote workers are limited to consumer grade wireless at home, this possess a huge problem.

Eliminate the Bottleneck of Desktop Management with PolicyPak

Regardless of how temporary a remote workspace is, the end goal should not just be to merely provide users access to the enterprise network, but bring the enterprise network to them. This includes deploying necessary configuration settings for the desktop OS and third party applications. It means providing a secure environment for users that prevents them from clicking malware and other types of malicious codes.

It means delivering the Start Screens and pinned Taskbar items that optimize the proficiency of the user desktop. It means ensuring that users have the same experience they have come to expect while working on premise, regardless of whether a computer is joined to the domain, azure, or nothing at all.

With PolicyPak eliminates distance cost when it comes to desktop management. PolicyPak is a modern desktop management solution that empowers you to easily configure, deploy, and manage policies for on-premises, MDM, and cloud Windows environments. PolicyPak was created with the notion that the location of a desktop should not affect an admins ability to fully manage and secure it.

PolicyPak is designed for Tomorrow’s Cloud Environments

Companies were already migrating services and workloads to the cloud prior to the COVID outbreak and this trend is only going to accelerate. Snipping the VPN cord doesn’t have to negate your ability to manage your desktops in the granular fashion available with Group Policy. PolicyPak lets you apply real Group Policy Settings through the Internet as well as the ability to dictate each and every tile of the Windows Start Screen. If you are considering implementing Windows Virtual Desktop, PolicyPak gives you governing admin rights over it too. Consider PolicyPak to be an on-premise solution that is 100% cloud compatible as well.

PolicyPak Least Privilege Manager

For instance, how do you prevent users from clicking on files that may have malicious intentions? Use PolicyPak SecureRunTM to prevent users from clicking on executables and other possible “gotcha” files that have malicious intensions. PolicyPak SecureRun^TM provides application white list like protection without the hassle of maintaining a white list. The premise behind SecureRun is simple. If an application wasn’t installed properly by an administrator or someone on the SecureRun Member list, it will not be run. This means that users see this:

Desktop Experience Optimization

Regardless of where a user currently resides, they should always have an optimized desktop that ensures desktop access, proficiency and productivity. That is where our solutions such as PolicyPak Start Screen & Taskbar Manager lets you place Desktop, Windows Universal and Edge tiles into your desired Start Screen groups and then keeps these groups locked so users cannot work around them.

Then there is PolicyPak Application Manager that lets you configure nearly every available settings Firefox, Java, Flash, Adobe products and hundreds of other enterprise applications. Visit our webpage to view our complete set of PolicyPak solution applications.

PolicyPak is Ready for the New Normal

Densification may be a new buzzword, but it describes a new work environment that PolicyPak has been ready for going back years. Our expertise is managing and securing desktops regardless of where they are located. Let us help show you how the PolicyPak solution suite can help prepare your enterprise for the “new normal” and the ones after that as well.

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