VMware leveraging tech to ensure maximum productivity and engagement: BS Nagarajan, VMware India

Following the spread of the Covid-19 and the subsequent national lockdowns across India, VMware has designed its business continuity plan to help customers digitally transform their infrastructure. This will allow remote working, without losing out on productivity, efficiency or security.

BS Nagarajan, Senior Director and Chief Technologist, VMware India, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How is VMware helping enterprises with BCP solutions?

BS Nagarajan: Right now, it is clear that business, as usual is not possible, and ensuring the safety and well-being of our employees, customers and partners is our top priority. We have redirected our focus to helping each other and our customers respond and adapt to what is still a rapidly evolving situation.

We are committed to helping our customers stay safe with seamless secure access to their work infrastructure and data. Of course, as a global digital transformation leader, digital workspaces and remote working solutions are a part of our portfolio. We had implemented these for our teams as well as customers across the world. This has given us a unique advantage when it comes to helping existing customers implement infrastructure and technology solutions for a distributed workforce.

Our business continuity plan has been designed to help our customers to rapidly digitally transform their infrastructure. This will allow remote working, without losing out on productivity, efficiency or security. Specifically, our business continuity platform offers:

* Delivery of digital workspaces on organizational or personal endpoints to access critical applications via Workspace One.
* Maximum protection of all endpoints that are accessing organizational assets remotely by leveraging the AI-powered security platform Carbon Black.
* Accelerated performance of organizational applications on remote connections with VMware SD-WAN.
* Elastic capacity to scale new users instantly and on-demand with our hybrid and multi-cloud offerings such as VMware Cloud on AWS.

DQ: How is VMware's BCP doing? How frequently is it updated?

BS Nagarajan: This current situation is unprecedented, and we are learning and adapting in real-time. As a global tech leader with thousands of customers across the world, we have in place resiliency plans for a number of scenarios including natural disasters and even pandemics.

We have proactively put several initiatives in place, as a result of which 30,000 people across our offices are working remotely seamlessly. VMware’s Global Crisis Management Team is monitoring the situation, as well as analyzing the business landscape to determine our ability to adequately handle business functions, and to meet corporate, customer, and stakeholder obligations.

We are leveraging advanced software that constantly combs media outlets, weather reports, announcements from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and similar organizations worldwide, utilizing internal social media platforms, collaboration tools, and two-way multichannel communications to provide and receive real-time information.

We are also harnessing the power of our Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) cloud computing solutions to enable maximum accessibility. We are leveraging VMware technology to ensure maximum productivity and engagement for our teams, partners and customers:

* Employees were advised to take their devices home and work remotely even before the country wide lockdown was announced.
* Our digital workspace platform, VMware Workspace ONE, gives employees complete, secure access to business-critical apps.
* VMware Tunnel provides a seamless VPN-like connection to any internal website.
* Virtual VMware Horizon desktop apps mimic Windows but do not require a laptop to operate, further enabling our employees to access all their software.
* We assure our teams of remote troubleshooting and live video assistance in case they need.
* Collaboration tools, chatbots, and various automated resolution software are all available remotely, offering immediate or near-immediate support.

DQ: How can enterprises now scale up on demand, post COVID-19?

BS Nagarajan: The future of work has been irrevocably changed and over the next few years, business continuity solutions will continue to power the new redefined future of work itself. As the world recovers from this situation we will see greater demand for robust business continuity solutions that can offer seamless secure access to the business application at the edge while leveraging hybrid clouds for easy scalability.

As we move forward, security will become a key area of focus and enterprises will adopt a proactive approach rather than just reacting to malicious threaths.

DQ: Now, many will make a beeline for the cloud. How are you looking to provide cloud-native endpoint protection?

BS Nagarajan: We are seeing significant increase in investments being made on cloud infrastructure across the world. With a highly distributed architecture and a multitude of endpoints, security is a top-of-mind concern for most enterprises.

Our vision has always been to deliver any app on any device on any cloud with security architected into every layer. VMware’s Carbon Black delivers complete protection from the data center to individual endpoints and devices and protects remote workforces from cyberattacks without any extra infrastructure. It also offers threat intelligence that delivers research, solutions, and strategies to minimize impact, decrease attacker swell time, inhibit lateral movement and suppress intrusions. Carbon Black is tightly integrated with our BCP solution in the form of Workspace One Intelligence.

The Carbon Black Cloud delivers the entire protection cycle of harden, prevent, detect, and respond for endpoints and workloads spread across the globe. It also protects remote workforces against cyberattacks without any additional infrastructure.

VMware Carbon Black Cloud makes it easy to reduce the attack surface, prevent malicious behavior, and respond to attacks no matter where the endpoints are located. Both, the employees being protected, and the security teams acting can operate effectively, without stepping a foot in an office.

DQ: Today, there are talks about the future of work. In this context, how are your digital workplace solutions positioned?

BS Nagarajan: As our CEO Pat Gelsinger says, this current experience and situation will change us forever and most likely result in a different perspective in critical areas, including how we work, learn, care for the sick and sustain the community. .Over the next few years, business continuity solutions will continue to power the new redefined future of work.

Remote working and work from models will become a norm, and work formats will get more distributed even as we continue to enhance the infrastructure to support it. VMware’s digital workplace solution Workspace One empowers employees working remotely with immediate productivity from day one on any device. They can access business applications with seamless SSO to all cloud and data center apps.

Intrinsic zero trust security ensures that compliance and risk are considered in real-time before granting access to applications, protecting enterprise infrastructure and data.