Recently, the well-known third-party consulting organization IDC has released a report on China VDI client device market. Affected by the pandemic, shipment of many VDI manufacturers experienced a large decline in the first quarter. Yet Sangfor has achieved a noticeable growth in the VDI market, ranking first in shipments with a market share of 31.49%, exceeding market share of No.2-7 in the ranking combined. If the pandemic has brought a lot of challenges to the VDI market, why is it that Sangfor can achieve growth while many others have experienced a major decline?
The Secret behind the 31.49% Market Share
The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought various levels of impact on different industries. Risks and opportunities coexist. Take government, enterprises, and financial institutes as an example, they are required to do both pandemic prevention & control and resumption of work, as a result, demand for desktop cloud mobile office has risen sharply. However, in the education industry, schools were unable to reopen, and the demand for desktop cloud dropped to freezing point. During this period, how to provide suitable products and services for customers in various industries has become the key to breakthrough for major VDI manufacturers.
Looking at the entire VDI market, the reason why Sangfor can rank No.1 this time is largely due to its ability to accurately capture the pain points of users in different industries and launch more targeted solutions that meet industry business needs.
For instance, in healthcare industry, one of the core demands of users using the desktop cloud is to simplify operation and maintenance.
Because there are various types of barcodes, wristbands, and document printers in the hospital, as well as various external terminal devices such as local printers, network printers, and shared printers, there are various driver and print configuration settings. Problems of IT O&M that need to be solved are: improve printer management efficiency, support printer configuration self-upload to the cloud, achieve printing tasks rapid recovery, etc..
The Sangfor desktop cloud R&D team self-developed the printer configuration retention function to avoid extra printer O&M work caused by desktop cloud template update. This solution, which precisely matches the needs of the healthcare industry, has been well-practiced in many medical institutions, including the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, which has greatly reduced the workload of hospital IT personnel and effectively improved O&M efficiency.
Moreover, Sangfor VDI also helped the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University to complete terminal rapid deployment in the isolation ward, achieving zero-touch O&M during the pandemic.
In financial industry, Sangfor VDI has also become a powerful assistant for efficient resumption of work for many financial institutions.
As a large joint-stock bank, Huaxia Bank has proposed the strategic direction of "fintech prosperity" in 2017, and marked"promoting fintech innovation" as their No.1 strategic priority. With the continuous expansion of personnel, needs for work means have become diversified. How to construct a terminal construction solution that can meet the needs for high-efficiency, remote operations, and security has become the key consideration of Huaxia Bank Information Technology Department.
Sangfor VDI's end-to-end security strategy for customers in the financial industry can ensure the security of office terminals from multiple angles including terminal access, image transmission, desktop management, data security, platform security, and management security.
During the pandemic, on one hand, Huaxia Bank innovatively used face recognition + dynamic password authentication system in ECC scenarios to determine the compliance of personnel access in real-time. On the other hand, they use Sangfor VDI to quickly complete remote development, ensuring both security and punctuality of the development.
Sangfor's ability to respond quickly to customer needs is inseparable from its cross-industry layout. Unlike some VDI manufacturers who are highly dependent on a single industry, Sangfor can provide highly adaptable solutions for financial, large enterprises, government, healthcare, education, and other industries with years of market insight and technological innovation. Especially in the face of unexpected situations such as a pandemic or changes in market environments, the advantages of Sangfor's specific industry solutions are more prominent.
The Pandemic has Forced Organizations to Rethink IT Terminal Construction
In fact, under the increasingly complex global situation, pandemic prevention and control have become normal. This means all industries must be prepared for a "long-term fight" against the pandemic, and they should start to rethink how to improve their "immunity" for such uncertainties in all aspects.
Traditional IT's disadvantages, i.e. lack of flexibility, weak security protection, and high investment, have been highlighted in this pandemic. All industries are undergoing digital transformation, and the construction of IT terminals is displaying a new trend:
Trend No.1: Mobile security office will become the new norm.
After the outbreak, remote office became the choice of most government institutions and enterprises, and employees could use their smartphones, tablets, and other mobile terminals to handle work at home. This flexible office model minimizes the negative impact of emergencies on government institutions and enterprises, at the same time it also subtly changes or even shapes end-users' work habits.
In post-pandemic era, mobile office will evolve from "abnormal" to "normal", and organizations will consider going mobile when planning IT terminals. Under this trend, VDI will change from an "optional" to a "mandatory option" for IT terminal construction. This will also place higher requirements on VDI in terms of mobility and security management. We may look at it from two aspects:
1. BYOD Mobile Office
With this mobile office trend, organizations will further implement BYOD strategy, allowing employees to access their personal desktops and company intranet at any time, any place, and through any terminal. Not only can they access OA, ERP and other business systems, but can also deal with financial, human resources and other data-sensitive work content, or even remote development.
Large-scale remote access poses a high requirement for VDI performance and experience. A good VDI solution should offer a simple and convenient experience that's consistent with local office experience no matter what terminal/operating system employee uses, so as to effectively improve work efficiency. Sangfor VDI has obvious advantages in mobile office scenario.
First of all, BYOD + Sangfor VDI can meet the mobile office demands of users and maintain user habits at the same time, which greatly improve productivity.
Meanwhile, enterprise IT departments can distribute data, applications and desktops through Sangfor VDI, dividing independent virtual work environment for each employee. Easily access company network with any device, new equipment, applications and data can be added at any time without having to reconfigure the terminal, which greatly simplifies IT O&M for mobile office.
2. Guarantee Enterprise IT Management and Asset Security
With full introduction of BYOD, security needs have also become prominent. For example, how to prevent leakage or loss of sensitive HR/ finance data during the mobile office? How to ensure source code won't be leaked during remote development? In addition, easy loss of mobile devices, poor security of third-party mobile application market and mixing of public and private data are all causes of enterprise mobile office security accidents. These are security considerations that companies cannot ignore when planning the construction of mobile office.
Sangfor as a leading vendor of network security and cloud computing, has more obvious advantages in the system and data security when providing VDI solution. For example: provide a variety of identity authentication methods to meet the security access needs of different levels of users; offer an end-to-end security guarantee mechanism to ensure VDI Platform is secure; deliver continuously desktop services and achieve high availability of data to avoid the risk of data loss caused by disk or host failure.
Trend No.2: Enterprise IT Construction Pursues Cost-Effective & Light-Asset Solutions
In the past, government and public institutions used to purchase office terminals themselves. The initial purchase of hardware required a large number of procurement costs. Later, heavy terminal operation and maintenance also consumed lots of IT resources. This pandemic has caused great losses to most enterprises, they are under high pressure to look for cost-effective terminal construction solutions. construction select.
Light-Asset DaaS Delivery Mode
During the pandemic, Sangfor launched Desktop as a Service. It's a light-asset delivery mode that combines the VDI advantages of security, high-efficiency, flexible expansion, and zero O&M. By using the form of service delivery to replace product delivery, DaaS has become one powerful solution for many organizations to accelerate the resumption of work.
In Jiangsu Province, Sangfor teamed up with China Mobile (Jiangsu) to build desktop cloud clusters in cities across the province, providing local users with DaaS, and achieving unified management of resources across the province. By using rental DaaS, organizations can do Pay as You Grow, without investing heavily in vulnerable IT facilities such as PCs, and recruiting PC operations personnel.
At the same time, the use of Sangfor's self-developed HEDC efficient desktop coding technology greatly reduces desktop transmission traffic, and intelligently controls the links to realize access via WAN and enjoy an operation experience comparable to LAN.
It is foreseeable that with the prevalence of light asset models such as DaaS, more and more customers are willing to choose a more flexible delivery method and release IT energy from low-value terminal operations.
Overall, Sangfor VDI solution meets the needs of users' IT terminal construction with many advantages such as high efficiency, security, smooth experience, and high-cost performance.
Conclusion
In the future, many more organization users will complete cloud transformation of office through VDI to achieve IT agility and drive business agility. In the post-pandemic era, Sangfor will continue to invest in R&D and meet the needs of customers with quick innovation. Sangfor VDI will continuously help more organizations realize transformation/upgrade of IT terminal construction.
