As work increasingly goes remote and hybrid, IT needs to change with it. According to Tim Minahan, EVP of business strategy, Citrix, by implementing DaaS solutions, companies can empower employees to work from anywhere without putting their corporate resources at risk.
When the global pandemic hit, companies worldwide were forced to radically change their work models and workforce strategies to keep business going. While most thought things would eventually return to normal, it’s clear there’s no going back. Everything has changed. And that’s a good thing. Hybrid and remote work have opened the door to greater innovation and business growth. With the right technologies and policies to support them, companies can knock them down and reap the rewards. And many are well on their way to doing so.Â
Let Freedom Ring
Commercial real estate planning used to be like Field of Dreams. You built an office, and employees came. This is no longer the case. Over the last two years, employees have been given the freedom to work where and how they want, using the devices and apps of their choice. And they aren’t going to give it up. A recent pollOpens a new window of 13,000 knowledge workers found that more than 90% plan to work on flexible models in the year ahead, with the majority indicating that they will remain fully remote.
Tear Down the Walls
As a result, companies are rethinking the office and its role in work going forward. Many have reduced their physical footprints and are working to create work-from-anywhere environments that give employees the space and tools they need to perform different types of work in the most optimal way. If they need to brainstorm or plan with their teams, the office might be best. If they need quiet time to focus on individual activities, working from home may be better.Â
Find Talent Where It Lives
Companies are giving their workforce strategies a fresh look too. The Great Resignation, The Great Reshuffling, the Great Revelation — whatever the term — workers are on the move. And to keep their business moving along with them, companies are looking beyond geographic borders to recruit the talent they need where they live, which may not be anywhere near an office hub. They’re also rebalancing the workforce, and where they might not be able to secure a developer or designer on a full-time basis, are hiring freelance and contingent workers who have that skill and are willing and interested in taking on projects.
Head for the Cloud
Regardless of where or how they work, employees need simple, secure, and reliable access to the systems and information to get work done.Â
In response to the pandemic, companies invested heavily in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)Opens a new window to ensure employees had the collaboration, communication, and productivity tools they needed to engage and be productive, wherever they happened to be. And it got them through. But it won’t carry them forward.Â
Managing VDIs in remote environments is extremely complex. Employees are working from homes, coffee shops, planes, hotels and any number of other locations. In some cases, they’re using their own devices and connecting through public networks. Cybercriminals are ready and waiting to take advantage of the security vulnerabilities this creates. But IT can stave them off by accelerating their digital transformations and pushing to the cloud.Â
See More: Cloud-Native Architecture: The Modern Way to Develop Software
Get on Board With DaaS
The future of enterprise computing lies in Desktop as a Service (DaaS)Opens a new window solutions. They allow IT organizations of any size to deploy secure remote desktops easily and provide safe and managed access to the applications and information all types of employees need to get work done, wherever it needs to get done.Â
Unlike on-premises VDI, DaaS solutions ensure sensitive information is stored on a secure cloud server rather than on individual devices. And IT can use them to overcome the unique challenges that distributed work presents, including:
- Unmanaged and BYOD protection: Employees working away from the classic office setting often prefer to use their own devices. And it’s tough to know how secure these devices are. With the right DaaS solutionOpens a new window and a strong zero-trust security approachOpens a new window , IT can ensure all devices on the network, including unmanaged and BYO devices, are protected.
- Securing applications and APIs: Applications are the lifeblood of every business. And more than 90% of IT vulnerabilities are application-based. Leveraging web application firewalls, distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, bot management, and authentication capabilities within DaaS solutions, IT can provide layered protection and consistent security management for all their APIs across multi-cloud networks.
- Safe collaboration: While remote working has eliminated the need to be in the office, it hasn’t eliminated the need for collaboration between colleagues, teams, and departments. With DaaS solutions, IT can ensure that data shared between collaborators is secured via encryption.
- User Experience: Technology should never get in the way of the employee experience. With DaaS solutions, IT can remove the frustration technology can create by providing unified, secure and reliable access to the apps and data they need and prefer to use to be and do their best.
In transitioning from VDI on-premises to the cloud, companies can stand up and empower all employees — not just full-time employees (FTEs), but contingent workers, seasonal workers, temporary labor, freelancers, designers, and even partners — to work from anywhere without putting their corporate resources at risk.
Major League Baseball (MLB) has proven it can be done. Throughout the pandemic, the league had to grapple with keeping players and employees working and safe. They implemented a DaaS solutionOpens a new window , and the games went on. They also extended the solution to smaller partners in their supply chain who lacked the resources to beef up their security requirements in the face of increased cybersecurity threats to be compliant and continue to deliver the high grade of innovative and quality services that MLB needed.
The future of work can be summed up in a word: flexible. IT organizations that embrace this and adapt their strategies to accommodate it can deliver the agility their companies need to propel their business forward, and like MLB, hit it out of the park.
How are you leveraging Desktop as a Service solutions as work increasingly goes remote and hybrid? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .