Now that I have finally finished shoveling my way to freedom after Snowmageddon 2011, I have time to reflect on what transpired over the last 48 hours. From looking at my calendar and inbox, it seems that with many people snowed in at home and some without power, not much work was getting done—and people not working means lack of productivity and money lost for most organizations. So why do events like power outages and weather need to affect the workforce? They really don’t.

Most organizations have VPNs in place for remote users to connect to the office. In my experience, many remote users will not and cannot use their VPN access effectively and be as productive as they would in the office. Many employees don’t have access to the VPN or many times just don’t know how to use it, and end up spending most of their time trying to figure out how to navigate through the network and gain access to email and files they may need.

The other traditional solution that many organizations have implemented is Citrix Presentation (now XenApp server), which tends to be hard to manage, complicated and expensive to deploy, resulting in those Citrix deployments turning into nothing but glorified Terminal Server sessions for most users. This doesn’t exactly give remote users the same experience as they do in the office.

So what do most users want from a remote access solution? Here’s what I’ve found:

1. Simplicity – If it is easy to use, people will use it. If their home experience is the same as their office experience, productivity will be up.
2. Reliability – If users cannot gain access or cannot connect reliably, they will stop trying.
3. Familiarity – If the users have access to their email, applications, files, and it looks like the same desktop experience that they have in the office, employees won’t have to waste time figuring out their remote connectivity.

Over the past few years, I have always been looking for the silver bullet for Business Continuity for desktop users. I’ve come across so-called solutions, but all have been difficult to implement and manage. I look back over the past few days and I say to myself, “VMware View would totally work for this!”

Why does it work? VMware View is not only a replacement for the physical desktop, it also enables remote access, giving employees the same desktop experience as they would in the office. View also offers flexibility in the implementation of the Security Server by providing a secure, low-cost remote access solution as part of the licensing. Plus, it also integrates well with the remote access technologies from Cisco, Juniper, and F5.

So I cannot help but wonder if more organizations implement VMware View as a Business Continuity solution, will the world stand so still when the next weather-pocalypse arrives?