Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
A CEO’s Outlook on Hybrid, Costs and Cyber
By Amitabh Sinha, Co-Founder and CEO at Workspot
Hybrid Work at the Forefront
It is not surprising that hybrid/remote work is having an impact on the way businesses adopt new technologies. However, as we move forward into newer implementations and budgets shift within the enterprise, we’ll see the hybrid work model take hold.
- The hyper-digital generations – like Gen Z – and others have found personal and professional value through a hybrid work experience. Organizations need to provide these workers with the tools they need to properly do their job, anywhere, anytime.
This workforce social paradigm shift, where employees have more power to make demands about how and where they want to work, will force the hand of organizations (even more) to ensure their benefits reflect the hybrid work era. As work models evolve to hybrid, the cloud becomes an even more powerful force for social change and for competitive advantage as businesses vie for the best talent available.
Strategic Rationalization of Cost
With all the economic constraints organizations are seeing today, budgets are not likely to increase for IT departments. However, this does not mean putting a halt to innovation and the next steps for digital transformation roadmaps.
Every company will have to think about IT innovation differently as they continue to monitor the ROI from current investments. What needs to drastically change is the time horizon for planning. It is no longer enough to think about what the next 12 months will look like. Now we must consider what the next 5 to 10 years will bring, how different scenarios could play out and what impact they will have for the business.
To move forward, leaders will have to align three aspects that go hand in hand to decide where and how to spend their tight budgets in the best way possible:
- Understand the corporate vision: The dissonance between business leaders and technology leaders has been one of the major handicaps for companies’ growth in the past. IT teams’ active participation contributing to overall business goals will drive spend strategically on short-term needs while addressing upcoming changes and challenges for the enterprise.
- Understand the infrastructure: A “do everything” or “do nothing” type of approach is not appropriate in a dynamic environment. Increasingly, organizations will need maximum agility from their IT investments to allow for both incremental and strategic changes, ensuring they are taking steady steps that move their overall company plans forward. Questions such as what data is most important? And are access and performance the most important traits for business continuity? Will become part of the budgetary equation.
- Understand the human aspect: The user will be at the core of new implementations as the need to improve end-user computing environments becomes a higher priority. Accessibility and flexibility are highly sought after today as they are allowing for further collaboration and the highest performance to deliver tasks and minimize any potential downtime. User experience is everything!
The Future of the PC is in the Cloud
For the last 10 years, the physical data center was changing in the interest of the cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service given the improved agility and security; the next step will be realizing the future of the PC.
Changing the approach to hardware is propelled by mainstream acceptance of hybrid and remote work. For example, leveraging Cloud PCs can provide organizations with the scalability and cost efficiencies they need to mitigate the major pain points their users face. Replacing a physical PC with a Cloud PC provides secure access from any device or browser while maintaining high performance, total security and the best user experience. Finally, Cloud PCs future-proof end-user computing, so organizations are ready for the next technology wave – and the next business upheaval.
The Cyber Crisis
It is not surprising that threat actors are taking advantage of the hybrid work world. Ransomware is costing organizations an average of $4.5 million, but that doesn’t account for one of the most financially devastating consequences: complete loss of productivity during the remediation process.
New approaches to ransomware recovery include Cloud PCs, which are serving as a modern “insurance plan” for getting people productive again – often less than an hour after an attack – enabling safe access to the data and critical applications employees need to keep the business running if the worst-case scenario becomes a reality.
Cloud PCs are deployed in an isolated, protected environment that can span multiple clouds and multiple cloud regions – so organizations can get back to work while mitigation and recovery steps are taken after an attack.
In the coming year and beyond, there will be an increase in cloud solutions and cloud architecture adoption to strengthen security for the enterprise. Among the options available today, Cloud PCs are at the forefront for end-user computing security. Look for Cloud PC solutions that separate the control and data planes and enforce the Principle of Least Privilege (POLP) for the strongest security.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amitabh has more than twenty years of experience across enterprise software, end user computing, mobile, and database software. Amitabh co-founded Workspot with Puneet Chawla and Ty Wang in August 2012.
Prior to Workspot, Amitabh was the General Manager for Enterprise Desktops and Apps at Citrix Systems. In his five years at Citrix, Amitabh was VP Product Management for XenDesktop and VP Engineering for the Advanced Solutions Group.
Amitabh has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
