How GPUs Accelerate Work-From-Home Productivity

Simultaneous with the heart-rending devastation wrought by Covid-19 pandemic, most companies also witnessed a highly disruptive shift from traditional office-based workforce to remote work culture and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policies. But even before the pandemic, recruitment from across the globe was a hallmark of most leading MNCs to enhance skill diversity in their workforce.

To support remote work originating partly from the pandemic and partly from globalization of the modern workforce, many progressive companies are opting for innovative ways to preserve the productivity of remote employees.

Some have begun leveraging the tremendous power of Cloud Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) offered by dependable Cloud GPU providers like Ace Cloud Hosting for facilitating robust remote-work ecosystems.

Let’s learn more about the role of GPUs in this novel work-from-home ecosystem.

What is Work-From-Home (WFH)?

As the name suggests, work-from-home (WFH) is a concept introduced for the enterprise workforce wherein employees can work from their home or any other location that is not within the office perimeter.

Previously, WFH needed a home-office setup for a fixed number of days over the week or month, and employees could access other, more sensitive resources from the office. But as we encountered the pandemic, the work-from-home culture became full-time, implying that the employee can work-from-home indefinitely and also remotely access the enterprise network and systems as per their allotted authorization.

To cater to WFH employees and their remote work access and authorization requirements, enterprises adapted to more suitable technologies and means to maintain employee productivity. Cloud GPUs have emerged as an excellent medium to accelerate work-from-home productivity and deliver reliable, lag-free computing service for enterprises.

According to a McKinsey report, 35% of American workers surveyed were working from home five days a week in 2022. Nearly 60% were working from home at least one day per week. Notably, this includes blue-collar workers as well who might be routinely expected to work on-premise.

Source: (McKinsey & Company)

To provide a flexible yet streamlined workplace with no hindrances for remote access, enterprises are heavily investing in developing robust, adaptable work environments. BYOD, Microsoft Teams/ Zoom webinars, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)/ Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), and software licensing have emerged as popular buzzwords in this era of hybrid workforce. Oxford Dictionary, in fact, picked “Zoom”, “Zoombombing” and “remotely” as its Words of the Year 2020.

No wonder, PwC reported that 70% of 100+ US-based executives surveyed in 2020-21 planned to increase their investments in IT infrastructure to secure virtual connectivity and flexible hybrid workplaces.

Introduction to GPU Computing?

GPU computing leverages advanced GPU hardware in tandem with ordinary CPU resources to accelerate compute-intensive operations. Multiple GPU cores work on different data nodes simultaneously to support parallel computation. This accomplishes complex and dynamic tasks like Machine Learning/ Deep Learning, real-time analytics, work-from-home virtualization, etc.

GPU computing is becoming popular because of the proliferation of applications for Big Data analytics and Artificial/ Graph Neural Networks (ANNs/ GNNs). These applications find use in social media analytics, crime prediction and tracking, healthcare, financial risk forecasting, etc. Moreover, enterprises and individuals have begun focusing on developing apps for every necessity and use case in line with the post-pandemic mode of living.

Complex app development work, juggled against the reality of remote work and virtual work environments, poses a challenge that can seamlessly be overcome by dependence on GPU-based virtualization systems. The hardware acceleration market (GPUs, AI accelerator, cryptographic accelerator, etc.) is expected to balloon to USD 75 billion by 2030, with the highest growth coming from the Asia-Pacific region.

Benefits of GPU in Accelerating WFH Productivity

Enterprises in highly-regulated sectors like healthcare, finance, cybersecurity, etc., want to incorporate virtualization by increasing mobility and 24×7 access to data, services, or resources. Along with better WFH productivity, these enterprises also need to foster enhanced data security and safety measures.

Therefore, such enterprises prefer Cloud GPUs that deliver impressive performance and enhanced data security in cost-effective virtual desktop environments.

Cloud service providers like Ace Cloud Hosting provide Cloud GPU services supported by top-of-the-line Nvidia GPUs such as the data center class A100-80GB. Let us explore the benefits underlying the introduction of GPUs in enterprise-level WFH systems.

Enhance Remote Employees’ Productivity

A high-performance virtual system is essential for any WFH or remote work employee. The virtual desktop environment must deliver an experience similar (if not identical) to a physical workstation.

Cloud GPU-accelerated systems can offer native PC-like experience with no latency since GPU servers are inherently designed to handle massive workloads and extensive computation.

Most advanced GPUs come equipped with hundreds of CUDA / Tensor cores facilitating massive-scale parallel processing. Nvidia GPU virtualization solutions also offer multi-core GPUs for better virtual desktop computation at a larger scale.

Superior Employee Experience

Who does not like seamless work experience? Seamless virtualization solutions can bring richness to employees’ work in terms of improved graphics quality, enhanced computation speeds, and reduced frame buffering, thereby contributing to higher data handling speed and glorious graphics visualization.

Enterprise-grade GPUs can provide smooth remote access experience and contribute to better employee response towards virtualized workplaces offered to them.

Bolster Regulatory Compliance in Remote Access

Today, every industry uses and stores customer data to improve service quality. Heavily regulated industries like healthcare, banking and finance services, as well as service-provider companies must safeguard personal data against cyberbreaches.

Securely hosting customer data & sensitive corporate information in data centers allows enterprises to strengthen their overall data security posture. Such corporate data and supporting applications can be easily accessed by work-from-home employees while continuing to maintain alignment with regulatory legislations and compliance protocols of the geographies serviced.

Utilizing Cloud GPUs in conjunction with intelligent security tools (IAM, PAM and SIAM) is the optimum solution here.

Manageability and Scalability

The pandemic demonstrated the difficulties enterprises encountered shifting from on-premise to remote workforce culture. It is expected that remote workforce requirements will keep on fluctuating in every organization in the coming years as they experiment with their work-from-home culture.

Such a fluctuation in WFH workforce and frequent login and accessing of virtual corporate resources need robust computational systems for proper management and authorization grant-and-revoke. This is why enterprises opt for Cloud GPUs which empower corporate systems to scale dynamically within pre-defined parameters without experiencing latency or lagging.

Read: Cloud GPUs: The Cornerstone of Modern AI

WFH Research and Development

For heavy R&D workloads where developers must develop and deploy applications to remote servers, standard GPUs won’t suffice. They require highly-specialized GPU infrastructure to handle complex computations such as those involved in Machine Learning modelling and Big Data analytics, etc.

In all such scenarios, employees can substantially benefit from access to Cloud GPUs in terms of computation speed, deployment efficiency, and research throughput. Their parent companies can avail the services of GPU-as-a-Service providers which can customize the Compute and RAM resources supplied along with the GPU as per the workload requirements.

Thus, heavy R&D workloads can be accomplished without unnecessary investment in exorbitant on-premise GPU infrastructure.

Conclusion

In cut-throat industries, no business can tolerate disruptions. And that is exactly what the Covid-19 pandemic brought about. It is now evident that to avoid any such disruption in the future, be it because of a pandemic or a disaster or any other crisis, companies must continue to strengthen their WFH resources.

Catering to a remote workforce residing in different corners of the globe, providing them access to virtual resources ranging from access to official mail to high-end software suites, bolstering productivity and minimizing latency, these are near-insurmountable goals.

Resolving these requires mighty computational systems, and Cloud GPUs have sufficiently proved their prowess in this regard. Whether you’re into AI/ML development or financial services management or cybersecurity, if you are developing applications or researching technologies in your respective arenas, GPUs can propel you to the top of the food chain, regardless of whether your employees work from office or home or elsewhere.

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