2025 will be a year the digital workspace takes center stage, says Karen Gondoly Leostream Corporation CEO and a 20-year IT veteran. The following are her predictions regarding technologies, concepts and trends expected to evolve and exceed our expectations in 2025. And, why those with modern, flexible, efficient IT environments will have an immense operational edge over those that do not.

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is the new acronym to know

Organizations will recognize the link between employee satisfaction and productivity, and Digital Employee Experience (DEX) encompasses a host of advantages from user-friendly interfaces to personalized workflows that enhance employee engagement.

"Organizations that adopt tools that monitor and improve DEX, such as data analytics to tailor resources to individual user needs, will have happier, more loyal, and more productive workforces, to the great advantage of the business," said Gondoly.

Digital workspaces become ubiquitous

In 2025 organizations will broadly adopt digital workspaces that provide the distributed workforce with consistent and secure access to resources. These environments will be more flexible and heterogenous than prior iterations offered as single-vendor stacks by industry giants.

"IT teams will realize that crafting a more vendor-independent digital workspace solution allows them to future-proof their infrastructure against unanticipated technology disruptions," she said. "There are many up-and-coming providers in this space, and they'll get increased attention."

The workforce goes fractional

A traditional 9-to-5 work model is increasingly obsolete, especially as more workers are freelancers, contractors, part-timers, and gig economy participants. Businesses in any industry can reap benefits from these fractional workers, who often bring specialized expertise to the team.

"To attract and retain fractional workers intelligently, IT pros need to focus on the tools and resources they need to do their jobs, on policies around the use of those tools and resources, and on monitoring or auditing to ensure those policies are successful," she said.

Risk management strategies embrace the cloud

The constant specter of cyber threats and the need for data protection will compel more IT pros to situate data and applications in the cloud not solely for availability as in the past, but for improved security, compliance, and disaster recovery capabilities.

"The Change Healthcare data breach disrupted the medical industry in 2023, and the CrowdStrike incident disrupted almost everything," said Gondoly. "Cloud-based risk management solutions will be more valued for business continuity and maintaining productivity."

Weathering industry storms

IT implementations will increasingly be seen as a line of defense against external forces that can disrupt a market segment-another reason digital workspaces will prevail. Beyond cybersecurity needs, there will be efforts to improve business technologies to withstand the impact of climate threats and natural disasters, civil unrest, financial crises, supply chain disruptions, and other factors that can impact an industry.

"Those with modern, flexible, efficient IT environments will have an immense operational edge over those that do not." 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Karen Gondoly combines executive leadership and technical skills to head up Leostream, a leading connection management platform for virtual desktop infrastructures, where she serves as both CEO and VP of Product Management. 

She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in aeronautical/astronautical engineering.

Karen leverages her extensive skills in software development, technical writing, GUI design and usability to further Leostream’s position as the leading Connection Broker for enterprise remote access and desktop connection management.

Karen earned her B.S. and M.S. in aeronautical/astronautical engineering from MIT, working summers at NASA’s Langley Research Center on a variety of projects from heat transfer models to LIDAR experiment designs.