Driven by rapid developments in manufacturing technology, the industry is going through massive change. Automation, AI, the IoT and human-machine interaction are now the backbone of modern manufacturing operations. In order to stay ahead in today’s hypercompetitive world, companies must work faster and smarter throughout the entire product lifecycle – from design to distribution. Further, manufacturers often leverage a global workforce of employees and contractors, as well as third-party partners. Enabling end users in these highly dispersed ecosystems is a huge challenge. With cloud-based VDI, however, companies can deliver the latest and greatest manufacturing technology to end users to become more efficient, secure and agile overall.
Why companies should use cloud-based VDI to deliver modern manufacturing technology
According to IDC, 60 percent of the top manufacturers will rely on digital platforms to improve their ecosystems and drive as much as 30 percent of revenues. This includes cloud-based platforms, collaboration systems, product simulation and virtualization technologies, and more. The end goal is to improve the approach to ideation, innovation and new product development. Deploying cloud-based VDI is the perfect way to get modern manufacturing technology into end users’ hands. Let’s dig into how desktop virtualization helps companies achieve these goals.
- Enabling a global workforce – As mentioned above, manufacturers leverage a geographically dispersed pool of talent and third-party partners through the product life cycle. These teams collaborate on centralized designs and graphics-intensive 3D applications. Before virtual GPUs and hyperscale cloud computing, professionals were tethered to extremely expensive physical graphics workstations. By switching to Google Cloud-based desktops – deployed and managed with itopia Cloud Automation Stack (CAS) – workers can access high performing NVIDIA-based GPU-accelerated virtual graphics workstations and applications anywhere and from any device.
- Protecting intellectual property – According to CIO Review, manufacturing is the third most targeted industry for cyberattacks. We hear news about stolen trade secrets and IP almost daily, after all. Given that the most vulnerable points in any organization are end user devices, storing sensitive data centrally in secure cloud datacenters just makes sense. Google Cloud, for instance, has top-notch security and compliance at every level of the stack, maintained by over 700 security experts. When users access that data, it is encrypted and doesn’t live on the device. Further, itopia CAS enables administrators to apply granular security policies from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
- Cutting costs – In order to be competitive, manufacturers are not only under significant pressure to get products to market faster, but to do so at the lowest cost possible. Deploying manufacturing technology through cloud-based desktops enables them to do this, and we’ve found that out of the major hyperscale cloud vendors Google offers the most competitive pricing. Further, by leveraging itopia CAS’ server uptime scheduling and autoscaling capabilities, companies can reduce GCP infrastructure costs dramatically. This is especially important for global organizations, which can automatically spin resources up or down from the nearest GCP data center according to the time zones workers are in.
- Business continuity – Because manufacturers are under the gun to get product to market fast, they cannot afford to experience any application downtime. Yet, it’s a fact of life infrastructure resources go down from time to time. To ensure that manufacturing technology is always available, itopia CAS enables the extension of multi-site Active Directory extension for disaster recovery in hybrid environments and across multiple GCP data centers. In other words, when infrastructure goes down in your primary location, workloads will automatically failover to another datacenter – with no impact on end user experience.
In the end, rapid innovation in manufacturing technology is changing the game in the industry. Gone are the days of sweat and steel in the factory. In what some people coin the “Industrial Revolution 4.0”, companies simply must embrace change and become more agile. With Google Cloud-based VDI deployed and managed by itopia CAS, companies can get powerful new technologies in the hands of their workers more reliably, efficiently, securely and at the lowest price possible.
