This is a guest blog post by Archana Venkatraman, Associate Research Director, Cloud Data Management, IDC Europe.
In the digital era, work models have to be transformed to foster human-machine collaboration, enable new skills and worker experiences, deliver an intelligent, secure, dynamic environment, and support hybrid-working models. This new workspace paradigm is the future of work (FoW).
IDC’s research shows that as a direct impact of the pandemic, 62 percent of organizations will add or expand their working-from-home HR policies, accelerating their FoW journey. Investments in cloud technologies have helped organizations to cope with the initial disruption, enabling a quicker return to growth and accelerating into the next normal.
IDC’s COVID-19 Impact Survey (Wave 3, April 2020) found that more than 90 percent of organizations are revising their long-term IT strategy with:
- A more aggressive push to the cloud (30 percent)
- Increased spending to enable digital workspaces (29 percent)
- More investment in risk management (26 percent)
- More investment in automation (23 percent)
The pandemic has brought profound changes and has challenged the status quo, forcing businesses to accelerate digital transformation (DX) strategies while leveraging cloud to deliver resilience, agility, and continuous business value.
In early 2020, the immediate focus was on business continuity and productivity, with investments in videoconferencing, mobile devices, applications, and enterprise social networks (IDC’s COVID-19 Impact Survey, Wave 2, March 2020).
Now, IDC is now seeing organizations considering a broader suite of strategic FoW capabilities, including cloud workspace management, self-service capabilities, and desktop-as-a-service, with high availability and secure data access to adapt to the new reality (see IDC’s COVID-19 Impact Survey, Wave 10, September 2020). This new strategic focus will help companies shift from ad hoc hybrid-working models to a hybrid-by-design model, leading to improved resilience and agility.
In the new normal, about 40 percent of employees will primarily work from home, compared with just 16 percent before the pandemic.
IDC research shows that digitally mature organizations, with cloud-based operating models, are better positioned to ride out the storm, showing the least amount of operational disruption. One example is how a large U.K.-headquartered retail bank launched a massive workplace enablement project to give virtual desktops to 90,000 users before the pandemic hit. This transformation is serving it well and enabling it to adapt quickly to the new world order.
With 75 percent of G2000 companies incorporating employees’ home network/workspace as part of the extended enterprise environment, IDC predicts that in the next two years, the G2000 will spend an extra $2 billion on desktop and workspace-as-a-service solutions.
While “digital first” prevails in every experience, a high number of organizations (60 percent) will invest heavily in digitizing employee experience in 2021, transforming the relationship between employers and employees.
To compete with these savvy organizations, IT and business leaders should see the pandemic as an opportunity to reduce their management overheads and complexity and bring greater dynamism into the business. Organizations should look to a modern, cloud-centric workspace and cloud-enabled management platforms to support FoW strategies. A cloud strategy is fundamental to deliver a hybrid-working environment and meet rising employee expectations.
Investing in a technology foundation for the future of work delivers immediate business value in the following areas:
- Flexibility and safety in working, using, and interacting with business applications, data, and co-workers
- Lower complexity and simplified management by IT staff
- Secure endpoints and systems, lower data breach and regulatory risks
- Services aligned to hybrid cloud models enable greater agility
- Optimized costs via consumption-based pricing
- Intelligent and analytics-enabled service delivery improves efficiency and speed
Picking the right technology partners and a modern cloud-enabled digital strategy will be pivotal for success.
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only accelerated work transformation — it has also redefined it.
IDC recommends prioritizing the following steps:
- Reassess workspace strategy and prepare for an intelligent digital workplace. Build a cloud-based digital platform that enables responsiveness, scalability, and resilience. Cloud adoption can be daunting, so avoid a “big bang” approach. Start small with one service such as virtual desktops delivered via the cloud and add complementary services gradually.
- Align workplace modernization with business outcomes to deliver on cost efficiency, talent retention, business agility, resilience, and collaborative innovation. Once benefits are clear, build on the experience and cloud usage skills to add more services in the cloud. This helps to de-risk cloud adoption.
- Choose platforms that meet both immediate requirements and long-term FoW goals.
To learn more, see IDC’s thought-leadership hub, sponsored by Citrix.
