Originally posted on http://www.vmware.com by Anne Hecht
Guest Blog By Anne Hecht, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, NVIDIA
The modern office and way we work will never be the same. While the COVID-19 vaccination will enable many to return to office, the need for a flexible, remote work option will continue. By 2024, 60 percent of the total US workforce will be mobile, with 87 percent of US companies expecting their employees to work from home at least three days a week.1
Enterprises are investing in building flexible work environments, and according to a recent survey by PwC, 70 percent of US executives will be investing in IT infrastructure for flexible workplaces.2 Organizations with hybrid work requirements need a great user experience as employees move seamlessly between the office and home.
Enterprises in highly regulated industries such as financial services are looking to virtualization to increase mobility, ensuring anytime access to data while also enabling improved security. The need for financial services organizations to protect client data makes moving employees to cloud-based, DaaS solutions challenging. By adding NVIDIA virtual GPUs to their on-prem, virtual desktop environments, these organizations can centralize apps and data to deliver secure, cost-effective VDI performance that scales from their core data center.
The benefits of virtual GPU are significant:
- Bolster security and regulatory compliance. As a heavily regulated industry, financial services organizations must safeguard data against information breaches and insider trading or face serious consequences. By securely hosting sensitive financial information within the data center, organizations can improve their overall security while simultaneously protecting data in the event of disaster. Not only does virtualization allow more users to securely access more applications, but it also enables secure work-from-anywhere workstyles.
- Enhance productivity and user experience. Financial services professionals can now access their workspace from anywhere, on any device with a native PC-like experience. With graphics acceleration, financial services organizations can take full advantage of modern business apps — including key apps such as Bloomberg and homegrown, customized ones — with significantly lower latency. In addition, NVIDIA virtualization solutions can satisfy unique financial services productivity needs such as multi-monitor support for brokerage systems and larger frame buffers for better data visualization and pattern recognition.
- Increase manageability and scalability. In all sectors, financial services organizations often have hundreds and thousands of users to support, from rolling out systems to quickly resolving issues. Moreover, on trading floors, every second of downtime equates to thousands of dollars lost. Now, financial services organizations can centralize data and applications in the data center, delivering virtual workspaces with improved manageability, security and performance while reducing downtime and support costs. IT can also easily manage large-scale virtualization deployments with end-to-end visibility of the organization’s infrastructure and proactive monitoring.
Increasingly, modern applications — including office productivity tools, browsers, rich multimedia content and virtual collaboration — demand levels of graphics performance and user experience traditionally not supported by CPU-only desktop and application virtualization. According to Lakeside Software, the GPU requirements for productivity apps have more than doubled between 2015 to 2020.3 The workspace setup for the financial services industry has also evolved with the average number of displays increasing by 81 percent from 2016 to 2020.4 To support the anywhere workspace, financial service firms are turning to virtual desktops managed from the core data center.
NVIDIA virtual PC extends the power of NVIDIA GPU to cost-effectively deliver immersive, virtualized hybrid workspace. Bankers, investment managers, financial advisors and insurance agents can finally enjoy VDI with a consistently great user experience that’s optimized for office apps and multimedia, and with performance as good as a physical PC.
With NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation, network-heavy apps like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters Eikon can be securely accessed from anywhere with GPU-accelerated performance, enabling traders and financial analysts to work seamlessly as they transition between the office and home.
A large US-based retail bank leveraged NVIDIA GPUs and vGPU technology to deliver excellent performance and user experience to their workforce. They easily supported multiple 4K and HD displays, allowing employees to expand their workspace and increase their productivity. Creative department users working on graphics-intensive apps, like Adobe Photoshop, collaborated in real time on collateral like brochures and proposals while information was securely stored in the data center, ensuring no leaks prior to a planned public release. Adding GPU acceleration to the data center increased the company’s server density by 30 percent. As a result, the company reduced its total number of servers and anticipates significant cost savings.5
Learn more about how NVIDIA vGPU technology brings GPU acceleration to end user computing solutions, providing the same experience as a physical PC or workstation. Experience the performance of NVIDIA and VMware solutions on Test Drive.
About the Author: Anne Hecht is the senior director of product marketing for GPU virtualization software at NVIDIA. Anne leads the product marketing team for virtual client computing and server virtualization solutions. Previously she held senior postions in product marketing and corporate marketing at enterprise technology firms Sun Microsystems, NComputing, ForgeRock, and Agari. Anne has an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.