Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Digital Experience, Cloud Standardization and Adoption, and Outsourcing to Shape EUC in 2023

By Simon Townsend, Field CTO, EMEA, IGEL

The end user computing space has evolved rapidly in the last few years with the shift to hybrid work. As we look towards 2023, we continue to see a tremendous amount of opportunity for growth for both IGEL and our partners as demand for secure, easy to manage digital workspace solutions increases, along with the need to improve the employee experience.

With that in mind, here are my predictions for the coming year:

• Digital experience management (DEM) will rise to the forefront. Experience has a direct impact on employee recruitment and retention.Hybrid work has placed a bigger burden on IT teams to make sure employees remain productive and satisfied in their work. DEM will continue to move up the priority list and garner more IT budget in the coming years as human resources departments begin looking to the CIO and the IT organization to remain competitive in terms of offering a productive, satisfying end-user experience.
• SaaS adoption will continue to grow. Many organizations don't want to or CAN'T afford to worry about application performance and management. Yet, they NEED it to drive productivity and efficiency, and scale their businesses. Like the challenges we all face storing and managing data including images, music, photos and other files, businesses will start to migrate to application management as-a-service models in which desktops and applications are a service they subscribe to, much like Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, or OneDrive. Microsoft AVD, Cloud PC, ServiceNow, and Salesforce are all great examples of this as they provide a scalable solution that can be automatically deployed, updated, and patched. While this isn't for everyone, it does offer a viable solution for many organizations that have been struggling with how they deploy and manage applications to their remote and hybrid workforces. Note, while SaaS and DaaS grow, a Windows report from 2018 still suggests that there were 6 trillion applications and titles in the world, meaning the world of applications will remain hybrid for some time.
• Standardization on hybrid cloud will drive agility and scale. Now that public cloud is accepted within even the most secure environments, more companies than ever before are adopting these platforms to deliver applications and workspaces to their end users. Yet, it is important to remember that the cloud is bigger than a single location, a company, or a person. It is about promoting flexibility, security, scalability, and affordability. For many businesses, standardizing on hybrid cloud, instead of purely public or private cloud offerings, provides the best of both worlds, and is something we will continue to see more of in 2023.
• Status quo to prevail on EUC deployments. Despite the disruption in the end user computing (EUC) space driven by M&A activity, innovation and evolving business models, organizations are more likely to stand by their current VDI, DaaS and SaaS providers. While many IT leaders might be inclined to panic or make ‘knee jerk' reactions in the face of uncertainty, they still must justify the decision for the business' key stakeholders, and this takes time, money, and resources that most cannot afford at this time. As such. businesses will likely stick with their current EUC provider for at least another year.
• IT will turn to global system integrators (SIs) for hybrid work. Prior to COVID, many organizations outsourced many of their IT services, from virtualization and cloud computing to data centers and storage, to SIs. This was especially true in the EMEA region. During the last three years, many of these same organizations have simply renewed their existing contracts as they tried to keep costs under control during the shift to remote and hybrid work.In 2023, we'll see these organizations strategically revisit their service contracts and look to expand their relationships with global SIs that have offerings designed to cost-effectively and efficiently support hybrid work environments.
• MSPs will get a larger piece of the endpoint management pie. On-premises hardware and software infrastructure are headed to the same place your well-worn LPs, CDs and DVDs went - to the basement where they will soon be forgotten. Whether it's the economy and financial constraints, the energy crisis, IT staff shortages, or simply the growing acceptance of cloud-delivered solutions, today's SMBs don't have the time, resources, or desire to manage endpoints. More importantly, it's 2023 and internal IT teams shouldn't really be managing, patching, and updating employees' desktops. The role managed service providers (MSPs) play in managing cloud infrastructure grew tremendously in 2022 and this will only continue to increase as businesses of all sizes look for a consistent model for delivering secure, manageable, and cost-effective EUC infrastructure.
• Ransomware will loom as "hacktivism" grows. The hybrid work era is making it more challenging than ever to project the endpoint. Ransomware is showing no signs of slowing down and will continue to have a tremendous impact on organizations of all sizes in 2023. Further, with an increasing number of threats coming from "hacktivists" and nation-states whose motives are intended to make a political statement rather than profit monetarily from these exploits, the threat landscape is increasing in complexity.

And one last thing to think about:

• In-person events are back and work from home will yield to work from anywhere in 2023. Having just spent four weeks trying to find a suitable venue for an event in Q1'23, I can tell you that company events, trade shows, and conferences are back! Vegas is SOLD OUT; Orlando is SOLD OUT; Nashville is SOLD OUT, and I could go on. Whether through small groups, or larger conferences, people are reminded of the importance and creativity that comes from being face-to-face to collaborate, learn and grow together. We came into 2022 with work-from-home and we will leave 2022 with work from anywhere as more companies and employees see the benefits of hybrid work.

2022 has had its ups and downs and has proven to be a transitional year as the world emerged from the pandemic. Yet, the lessons we have learned have had a profound impact on the technology trends we will see in 2023 and we are looking forward to a healthy and prosperous new year for both IT teams and the end users who are more demanding than ever.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Simon Townsend

As EMEA Field CTO, Simon's primary role is to interface with customers, partners and IGEL's own sales, marketing, and development teams to help both IGEL and its customers navigate through an ever-transforming market. Having spent four years as IGELs Chief Marketing Officer and with 20 years' experience in the end user computing market, Simon has helped manage marketing, product marketing, product management and Global Systems Engineering for several enterprise software companies. He joined IGEL from Ivanti where he was Chief Technologist and a member of the Office of the CTO. A frequent industry speaker, author and visionary on industry topics related to endpoint security, VDI, Citrix, Windows and DaaS. He holds a bachelor's degree in IT and business.