IT budget planning is a top priority for business leaders in the new year. As a result of the pandemic, many businesses invested in new IT solutions or expanded on existing ones to stay afloat. IT teams are rethinking their approach to end-user computing to address the long term, despite the fact that some decisions were initially thought to be temporary. However, many businesses discovered that employees were actually more productive in a remote work environment.
Digital transformation has been accelerated by businesses in all sectors to meet changing employee demands for flexible work styles. In point of fact, 76% of them concur that doing so enables them to attract and keep top talent from a global pool of competitors. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and other outdated technologies will be replaced as businesses continue to support remote work.
There are three major cloud computing trends that should be taken into consideration by leaders of businesses looking for solutions that are scalable, secure, and reliable and enable remote access to resources that are essential to their operations:
1. The days of on-premises VDI are over. If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that businesses must be willing to change in order to succeed. Consequently, cloud transformation is on the rise, as 83% of IT leaders claim that remote work has expanded or accelerated cloud strategies. An IT architecture that is designed for a modern business and can quickly and easily adapt to change is necessary for agility.
VDI is also changing, moving from on-premise DIY desktops to cloud-native SaaS infrastructures, just as the film industry switched from VCRs and DVDs to online streaming services. IT leaders are now turning to cloud-native end-user computing solutions as it becomes increasingly apparent that traditional virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and physical personal computers cannot meet today’s security, performance, scalability, and reliability requirements.
On-premises VDI and physical workstations and virtual desktops present significant difficulties for IT personnel. Each strategy’s complexity prevents immediate scalability, which impedes end-user productivity and makes collaboration among multiple locations more difficult. Additionally, these strategies are pricey. Access to technology updates necessitates expensive hardware refresh cycles, and the majority of businesses cannot sustain resource-intensive VDI management, troubleshooting, and maintenance.
Cloud PCs are being used by businesses in all kinds of industries to give their businesses the scalability and cost savings they need to stay ahead of the competition. End-user computing is future-proofed by replacing traditional access to resources with a cloud PC, which provides secure, high-performance access from any device or browser. This ensures that businesses are prepared for the subsequent technology wave or business upheaval.
2. In a recent survey, 90% of IT decision-makers indicated that multi-cloud strategies are working for their businesses. Hybrid and multi-cloud strategies are the future. Since moving to the cloud is an investment that takes time and resources, many businesses move slowly. This means that they still use their legacy investments, like on-premises data centers, at some point.
A smooth transition from the on-premises data center to the cloud is made possible by a adaptable cloud PC solution that supports hybrid, multi-cloud, and other cloud services. However, in order to reap the benefits, a multi-cloud budget strategy must take several factors into account, the first of which is defining the characteristics of each workload moving to the cloud. Next, budgets should be divided into projects so that each workload can be optimized in its own way across multiple dimensions. Last but not least, choosing the right cloud provider for each project is crucial because every public cloud has distinct advantages and disadvantages as well as variable cost structures.
Businesses can decipher specific logistics with these considerations in mind, such as whether cloud usage should be billed hourly or annually based on the use case. In these scenarios, project leaders, the financial and product teams, and project managers need to agree on the company’s future goals and have a deep understanding of each project’s specifics and workload in order to make informed decisions.
3. The modern “insurance plan” for ransomware recovery is cloud PCs. The average ransomware attack costs $4.5 million, but that does not take into account the most damaging outcome: total productivity decline It is not only costly financially to shut down workplace operations to investigate and stabilize the attack surface, but it also damages the brand’s reputation.
By developing a strategic recovery plan, businesses must go beyond prevention for business continuity. Cloud PCs are acting as a modern “insurance plan” for ransomware recovery in this context, allowing workers to resume their work while IT leaders investigate and mitigate the damage.
A report by Sophos says that it takes an average of 30 days to fix a ransomware attack. This means that a company of 1,000 people could lose upwards of $10 million in productivity for a whole month. Cloud PCs give leaders of businesses the assurance that they can provide secure access so that employees can return to work within an hour or so of an attack to keep the business running. The financial risk of 30+ days of downtime outweighs the cost of protecting a fleet of standby cloud PCs in light of the current threat landscape.
How to Prepare Your Business for the Future in 2023 and Beyond In order to remain competitive in the ever-changing business environment, businesses will need to make crucial decisions in 2023. The adoption of technologies that place an emphasis on agile and secure end-user computing will increase in tandem with the rise in popularity of hybrid and remote work. Cloud PCs enable hybrid work environments to evolve continuously, resulting in an IT infrastructure that is “evergreen” and secure for the future.