Forced by the pandemic to provide employees with access to the systems and information they needed to work from home, IT organizations around the world turned to traditional technologies like Virtual Private Networks (VPN). And they worked. But as the world moves to hybrid work, 96% of IT leaders who participated in a recent global survey conducted by Gartner Peer Insights on behalf of Citrix Systems, Inc., say they no longer cut it. And they're rethinking their approach.
A Seismic Change
Hybrid models have radically changed where and how work gets done — and even who does it. Of the organizations who participated in the poll:
■ 96% have a hybrid work policy or allow both fully remote and hybrid work
■ 85% say their workforce is more geographically dispersed than it was two years ago
■ 75% have seen an increase in the number of seasonal, contract, or freelance workers
A Major Miss
When it comes to supporting these changes, respondents say the solutions they put in place to enable remote work fall short in the following areas:
■ Fail to protect against additional security risks posed by employees working from anywhere (96%)
■ Create a digital divide between in-office and remote employees (63%)
■ Don't provide a consistent user experience (46%)
■ Hinder efficient collaboration among distributed employees (46%)
■ Don't support bring-your-own-device initiatives (33%)
■ Difficult to scale and manage (25%)
A Strategic Shift
And they are increasing their investments in technologies that allow them to provide a simpler, more consistent and secure experience for employees regardless of where they work, including:
■ Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) (69%)
■ Virtual apps and desktops (56%)
■ Desktops as a Service (DaaS) (42%)
■ Zero trust network access (34%)
A Layered Approach
VPN remains the most popular solution to support remote work. But as the research reveals, it's not enough to enable safe and productive hybrid work on its own. According to the poll, 87 percent of respondents using VPN have implemented at least one other solution to close the gaps, including:
■ VDI (69%)
■ Virtual Apps and Desktops (49%)
■ DaaS (39%)
Desired Results
And in doing so, they're achieving their goal. When asked to identify the top three benefits their hybrid work solutions provide, participants in the poll said they:
■ Provide layered protection for all devices on the network, including unmanaged and BYOD
■ Create an equitable work experience by providing employees with consistent and reliable access to applications and data regardless of where they are working
■ Provide layered protection and consistent security management for all applications
"Hybrid work is the future of work" said Tim Minahan, EVP of Strategy, Citrix. "Innovative organizations recognize this and are reimagining the solutions used to support it so they can deliver it today."
The Latest
Government agencies are transforming to improve the digital experience for employees and citizens, allowing them to achieve key goals, including unleashing staff productivity, recruiting and retaining talent in the public sector, and delivering on the mission, according to the Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Survey from Riverbed ...
App sprawl has been a concern for technologists for some time, but it has never presented such a challenge as now. As organizations move to implement generative AI into their applications, it's only going to become more complex ... Observability is a necessary component for understanding the vast amounts of complex data within AI-infused applications, and it must be the centerpiece of an app- and data-centric strategy to truly manage app sprawl ...
Fundamentally, investments in digital transformation — often an amorphous budget category for enterprises — have not yielded their anticipated productivity and value ... In the wake of the tsunami of money thrown at digital transformation, most businesses don't actually know what technology they've acquired, or the extent of it, and how it's being used, which is directly tied to how people do their jobs. Now, AI transformation represents the biggest change management challenge organizations will face in the next one to two years ...
As businesses focus more and more on uncovering new ways to unlock the value of their data, generative AI (GenAI) is presenting some new opportunities to do so, particularly when it comes to data management and how organizations collect, process, analyze, and derive insights from their assets. In the near future, I expect to see six key ways in which GenAI will reshape our current data management landscape ...
The rise of AI is ushering in a new disrupt-or-die era. "Data-ready enterprises that connect and unify broad structured and unstructured data sets into an intelligent data infrastructure are best positioned to win in the age of AI ...
A majority (61%) of organizations are forced to evolve or rethink their data and analytics (D&A) operating model because of the impact of disruptive artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, according to a new Gartner survey ...
The power of AI, and the increasing importance of GenAI are changing the way people work, teams collaborate, and processes operate ... Gartner identified the top data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2024 that are driving the emergence of a wide range of challenges, including organizational and human issues ...
IT and the business are disconnected. Ask the business what IT does and you might hear "they implement infrastructure, write software, and migrate things to cloud," and for some that might be the extent of their knowledge of IT. Similarly, IT might know that the business "markets and sells and develops product," but they may not know what those functions entail beyond the unit they serve the most ...
Cloud spending continues to soar. Globally, cloud users spent a mind-boggling $563.6 billion last year on public cloud services, and there's no sign of a slowdown ... CloudZero's State of Cloud Cost Report 2024 found that organizations are still struggling to gain control over their cloud costs and that a lack of visibility is having a significant impact. Among the key findings of the report ...
The use of hybrid multicloud models is forecasted to double over the next one to three years as IT decision makers are facing new pressures to modernize IT infrastructures because of drivers like AI, security, and sustainability, according to the Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report from Nutanix ...
