The cloud has recently proven to be a vital tool for many organizations to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic by enabling employees to work from home. To me, COVID-19 has clearly shown that work doesn't need to happen at the office. It has strengthened our belief that working from home is going to be the norm for many.

The move to the cloud introduces many technical challenges, even though we're taking away some of the complexity of maintaining an extensive IT infrastructure. But we're also adding a new layer of complexity to an already complex IT landscape. Besides the technical shift, we'll also see a change in responsibility and accountability.

The Desktop is Not the Hard Part

Imagine moving your desktops over to the Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) or Citrix Cloud. All of a sudden, Microsoft or Citrix are responsible for delivering the desktop that runs your applications to support your business. How far does the responsibility of the vendor reach? Is it just the infrastructure, or are they also responsible for the applications' availability and performance? Am I — as an IT director — still accountable, and how can I provide insights about this?

At the same time, we see an ever-increasing rate of change. To be able to handle this increased rate of growth, an organization shouldn't merely lift and shift their workloads to the cloud. Instead, they should also review and modernize their operations. Agile and DevOps have been around for quite some time in the realm of software development. We believe organizations should also incorporate these concepts into their IT management processes so they can facilitate change instead of controlling it.

Modernize Change Management

Guaranteeing the availability and user experience of the digital workplace and, thus, with employees' productivity and the continuity of the company should be the highest priority. On the one hand, by supporting the change management process with data about the impact a change will have on production systems and automating change in the digital workplace. On the other hand, by continuously testing production environments, including desktop applications (whether in the Cloud) for availability and performance  and reporting on this clearly and simply.

Towards the future, we want to give substance to our "DevOps for Desktops" concept in which we want to plot the thinking of DevOps onto the digital workplace. Our vision is that deep integration of our automation and test platforms enables the customer to implement changes faster and with higher quality, both on-premises and in the cloud.