In the era of the mobile workforce, employees are no longer working at fixed locations, they have flexible work schedules and utilize a variety of devices. Flexibility is one key benefit that both employees and companies are hoping for from IT services in order to increase their productivity.
At SAP, thousands of internal and external workers in organizations like Sales, Pre-Sales and Consulting are accessing the company resources from non-SAP networks flexibly with the great virtual desktop solution provided by SAP IT Services.
The very user centric and simple web-based Virtual Desktop Access Portal, is available to SAP users at anytime from anywhere. With the two-factor authentication, users can connect to SAP securely from practically any device, such as Windows, Macintosh, Linux, smartphones, iPad, etc.
Via the Access Portal, there are a wide spectrum of highly available XenApp-based and XenDesktop-based virtual desktop services offered to SAP end-users.
Possible Use-Cases:
- A Sales or Presales representative visiting a customer to introduce the latest SAP products. With the SAP IT Client Virtualization Access Portal, he can easily connect to SAP and showcase any SAP application (hosted on virtual desktops inside the SAP network) in real time to the customer. Furthermore, he has full access to all data stored in the SAP network as the connected virtual desktops are centrally hosted in high availability SAP data centers.
Thus, data security and service availability are assured. This is also a great option for any employee who needs to remotely access company resources such as presentations, documentation or guidelines from company file servers and present to customers or at an external event. Access is available whether he is travelling or working from home or even working on non-SAP devices.
- An SAP Partner needs to fulfill a support agreement with SAP. For example, cloud administrators who need to provide mission critical support to SAP Cloud customers or managed vendors who provide essential IT services to the SAP Cloud infrastructure and possibly administer and update SAP systems in the SAP data centers. With the virtual desktops behind the Access Portal, they are provided with a fully-fledged workplace including all necessary tools and software to deliver the required daily tasks. SAP Partners can connect in seconds and they do not have to worry about any updates on their 7x24 available carefree SAP IT workplace.
By provisioning virtual desktop services to users, no matter where the users are accessing from, their workspaces are centrally stored and managed within SAP data centers. Thus, the IT support effort in dealing with external workforce and remote users are much more under control than physical device deployment. It is a win-win for both end-users and IT, because the user can receive the same desktop experience (including applications, and settings) whenever and wherever they want.
What is Behind the Access Portal?
The SAP IT Client Virtualization Access Portal, based on Netscaler technology, is the first touch point for employees working worker outside of SAP.
After a secure two-factor authentication, the user will be connected to a virtual server landscape, based on XenApp and XenDesktop technologies.
Some virtual desktop services are open to all employees with a standard set of corporate applications like SAP GUI, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, etc., while some others are customized and provisioned based on individual demands and requirements.
Access to internal resources like the intranet, mail, file repositories and more is available on this shared desktop service and the assured data security as well as the two-factor authentication highly enable SAP’s workforce extension to external.
