Organizations’ ability to manage and master the unexpected has been put to the test in the last few months. Companies have moved mountains to keep their businesses running, and employees have answered the challenge, balancing work and life like never before.
At the onset of the pandemic, many Citrix customers were able to transition employees from working in the office to working remotely, often adjusting their cloud strategies on the fly. The goal: keep the business running while ensuring employees were set up to succeed at remote work.
Recently I joined Maribel Lopez in conversation with Stu Miniman from theCUBE about the global remote work “experiment” we’ve all been a part of. We covered a variety of topics, but at the very top was employee experience, how it has changed, and what companies are doing to make it better.
Empowering Employees
Over the last six to eight months, many organizations have shifted focus from just the digital customer experience to employee experience. In Citrix’s new Work 2035 study, we found that due to COVID-19 more than 90 percent of business leaders have shifted focus towards employees. While some companies were immediately successful with remote work, many felt their systems were stressed as they tried to deliver remotely what employees were used to in the office.
Getting that right is vital.
Studies show a high correlation between company performance and employees who say that they have very good to excellent digital tools to work with. The transition to remote work has forced many to leave behind familiar things — routines, technologies, capabilities — that propelled them through their day.
But were those familiar things truly empowering? Did they unlock employees’ potential or were they actually barriers to creativity and productivity?
Citrix technologies give employees access to apps and other resources, wherever they are or whatever device they’re on, with the security and controls necessary to protect corporate assets. Citrix Workspace has been critical for our customers in delivering virtualized applications and desktops, as well as SaaS, web, and even homegrown service-based and mobile apps, with the same (or even better) experience employees had in the office. You can learn more about how Citrix Workspace can help enable and empower your employees at our upcoming Workspace Summit.
Secure Workspaces
Admins need control over the apps inside the workspace experience, no matter which app the employee is using or whether the device is managed or unmanaged. Many enterprises have for years relied on employees leveraging personal devices and have heavily relied on VPN to give employees access to corporate resources.
The downside?
If a bad actor gets VPN access to an organization’s network, they can get to everything the employee had access to.
Citrix has moved its security focus from the device to the workspace. This enables admins to deliver the same security profile across multiple platforms and endpoints, all while providing the great experience employees expect. Our app delivery and security products protect the enterprise resources employees access daily. Admins get peace of mind, while employees can focus on their work and unlock their potential. The Citrix Security Summit covers our approach to protecting both your workforce and your apps with our zero trust IT model.
Cloud Transition
The big question for many companies used to be, “How do we deploy something today that gives people flexibility to work from anywhere?”
You must establish a cloud infrastructure that provides elastic capacity for your organization. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Citrix was able to support customers who had only on-prem deployed solutions and hybrid-cloud customers who had on-prem and cloud. Those hybrid-cloud customers took advantage of that elasticity and were able to shift the distribution and scale rapidly to the cloud.
That elasticity gave them a degree of freedom that customers who were 100 percent on-prem didn’t have. They just went into an accelerated scaling plan and moved more rapidly into the cloud, enabling a better and more flexible work-from-home experience for their employees. This flexibility has given these customers greater agility in moving forward, and most never intend to go back.
For on-prem customers, the options were limited. Either, they had to figure out how to buy hardware and scale on-prem or begin their first-ever cloud deployment during a crisis, an incredibly challenging thing to do. For many, it was a high-wire act without a safety net, but Citrix was able to help customers succeed in their transitions.
Along with cloud, network infrastructure and technology have scaled to meet the unprecedented demand for shared computing resources. Accessing vast quantities of capacity that are cloud-based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. The upcoming Citrix Cloud Summit provides a broad overview of our solutions including updates on our partnerships with Google, AWS, Microsoft and others.
A Future without Constraints
Citrix can help you to explore the possibilities and position your organization for long-term success. We’ve been on this journey with our customers, delivering technologies that enable employees to work how and where they want, long before remote work became our new normal. And together, with our customers, we are building a future without constraints, where employees are a company’s most valuable assets and are empowered to accomplish amazing things.
