Safely Transitioning Users to the digital age

The IT industry is going through a huge change. Key trends driving this change are cloud, mobility, social networks and big data and analytics. The Economist recently reported that by the year 2020 80% of adults will have a mobile device equivalent to today’s supercomputers.

This drive towards mobility is creating an explosion of devices within our environments. In addition these new mobile platforms are forcing development of Cloud first, “as-a-Service” applications. These applications are designed for volume and velocity and are fundamentally different from our legacy enterprise applications.

These new Cloud first applications are providing analytics by default driving big data usage. As the ability to measure user interaction within mobile devices grows, an increase in the volume and number of data points provides more information and greater intelligence.

This drive towards mobile and increased digitization is creating both friction and pressure for our traditional IT organizations as they struggle to manage risk and compliance while enabling freedom and choice for users. The risk to not responding to these demands is not an option as our Lines of Businesses actively look to Cloud options to deliver lower costs and greater mobility with our without our blessing.

From an IT perspective, this leaves us caught between two worlds with limited flexibility and fairly static budgets. From an End User perspective, we have large high touch enterprise desktop environments that create tremendous operational demands on our time and resources, leaving little left over for proactively planning for Cloud and Mobility.

In developing a strategy to break this cycle it is important to drive new operational efficiencies into the management of desktops by redefining our desktops as software. This can be accomplished today by introducing virtualization at the desktop, application and user metadata layers. This allows us to drive to a more non-persistent, cached desktop. A cached based desktop can provide a similar user experience as a traditional physical desktop at much less operational cost and overhead.

Making an investment in a end user virtualization software stack should include tools to both virtualize a desktop environment and deliver enterprise mobility and policy management. Only in this way can we drive down operational overhead, plan for mobility and future proof our desktop and mobility strategies.