The future of business has been thrown into fast-forward by the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies are being forced to embrace remote and hybrid workplace models, thanks to the restrictions enacted to protect workers from being exposed to the disease.

But safety in the workplace has a digital component as well as a health one, and security protocols are just as important as protection from COVID.

“As organizations embrace work from home for the foreseeable future, they need to create secure by design digital workspaces for remote working,” said Satish Yadavalli (pictured, right), vice president of global cloud and infrastructure (CIS) at Wipro Ltd.

Yadavalli; Arwa Kaddoura (pictured, center), vice president of worldwide sales, GreenLake, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.; and  Saadat Malik (pictured, left), vice president of IoT and intelligent edge services at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., joined Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a “Practical Solutions for Today” panel session during the Workplace Next event. They discussed how HPE’s ecosystem is collaborating to provide tools to help small to mid-sized enterprises overcome the challenges of transitioning to a remote or partially remote workforce.  (* Disclosure below.)

COVID-19 accelerates workplace transformation

“The digital workplace was already transforming before COVID-19 happened. What COVID-19 has done is massively accelerated the pace at which the change is happening,” Malik said.

Existing systems were strained, and security became pivotal to the conversation as data flowed across a dispersed environment. “It’s no longer being generated in one place and stored in another; it’s all over the place now,” he added.

To evolve the workspace, HPE has partnered with Nvidia Corp., Citrix Systems Inc. and Wipro to expand its GreenLake virtual desktop cloud services. Announcing the solution, Yadavalli said it aims to “bring hyperscaler capabilities to customers on-premise or on hosted infrastructure.” This enables customers to “fast track their workplace transformation efforts by eliminating the need for upfront capital investments and/or provisioning costs while enjoying the benefits of on-premise control, security, and compliance,” he said.

In the complexity of today’s hybrid, multicloud world, customers are looking for flexibility, cost-efficiency and security.

“They need access to their data centers in a very secure way, and in a highly cost-optimized way as well,” Kaddoura said, describing GreenLake as the cloud that comes to your data center, your colo, or to your edge. “What we’ve done is we’ve brought together the best of our Pointnext Services, our software management layer, as well as HPE’s rich portfolio of hardware … to create that cloud experience,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Workplace Next event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Workplace Next event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE