Back when most of the IT experts of today began in the industry, the only infrastructure that was readily available and dependable was on-site servers and networks that were bulky, expensive, and time-consuming to manage and maintain. The last ten years have witnessed tremendous advancements in information technology. Now, IT engineers can design, develop, and implement a company’s entire IT infrastructure within a cloud environment in a fraction of the time it used to take. This good news isn’t just for the IT experts, but for the everyday business owners as well!

Because cloud infrastructure is readily available, you can take advantage of high-powered cloud computing through Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). Although DaaS may sound complicated, it’s not. You can use any internet-connected device to access your operating system, applications, business data, and even your desktop settings.

What does that mean for your business? It means anywhere, anytime secure access to your company’s workflow. But that’s just the beginning of the high-impact benefits for forward-leaning companies that choose to leverage the power of Desktop as a Service.

1
Eliminates Grunt Work

Using a DaaS saves your IT department from having to do mundane grunt work such as application licensing, patching, and troubleshooting.

Outside of the fact that DaaS lowers your IT management cost by shifting that responsibility to the cloud provider is the fact that your organization has to spend less effort on maintaining your IT assets. Even companies that have outsourced their IT maintenance to a 3rd party still have a measure of IT housekeeping that they must do internally. DaaS makes IT maintenance and management hands-free for your staff – allowing them to be more effective and efficient in the tasks they were hired to do.

If you’re tired of employees complaining about their computers – or about the IT support – if you’re sick of doing endless updates, upgrades, patches – all to avoid the blue screen of death – DaaS is where you want to be. Most cloud providers offering DaaS have proven their ability to maintain their promise of 99.99% reliable uptime. That’s good news for your workflow and for your ability to focus on your work – not IT issues.

2
Data Redundancy

DaaS puts your company’s workflow in your hands instead of at the mercy of IT roadblocks, ransomware, or a natural disaster like hurricanes, fires, and tornados.

You don’t have to worry about a local network crashing – because there is none. It’s all in the cloud. You don’t have to think about losing data if your laptop dies – because your actual “computer” is virtual and all your data is stored in the cloud. Instead of having an operational IT system and a Business Continuity strategy backup system, you’re using your Business Continuity system every day in the cloud.

Since your data is stored at a secure facility offsite; or, in the case of IronOrbit, stored at multiple data centers, it is protected against onsite server failure or natural disasters. Having redundant backups provides a safety net. If a natural disaster impacts data center one, data center two kicks in automatically.

3
Increased Security

IT support teams in businesses take reasonable precautions to guard against cybercrime. These security measures cannot compete with the security technologies employed by cloud providers delivering DaaS options for businesses.

Critically DaaS shifts the security burden away from the individual device and places it within a data center infrastructure designed for the highest levels of protection. To put it simply, it would be cost-prohibitive for a small to mid-size business to hire even one IT security professional to protect their in-house systems to the level of a Tiered private cloud hosting partner.

Data is no longer vulnerable on a local device but held – and regularly backed up – in a secure hosted environment; it is also encrypted and can be made accessible only through multi-factor authentication protocols. The addition of a designated managed service provider also has its advantages. Systems are monitored 24/7. For example, a managed service provider can prevent someone from stealing data using a USB. That’s why enterprise-class organizations, the military, and the government are overwhelmingly looking to cloud providers to host their workflow. The security is there.

4
Enhanced Flexibility, Agility, & Mobility

We’ve already noted that cloud infrastructure along with new virtual desktops for your staff can be deployed in record time in comparison to traditional on-site IT setups. But that’s just a baseline. Consider the fluctuations of the marketplace over the past few years. The companies that survived and thrived were the ones most able to, in the words of Mohammad Ali, “Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” Companies need a high level of agility combined with decisive leadership that can act quickly. DaaS allows you to scale up or down easily, add or reduce capacity, and change directions on the fly if needed.

Once you’ve moved your IT system to a DaaS, mobility becomes much easier. Modern companies are flexible enough to have their employees work from anywhere and on any device of their choosing. To thrive in the new cloud ecosystem, companies will need every tool available to be resilient. Teams will have to expand and contract at a moment’s notice, and they will need to respond quickly to opportunities the moment they appear. DaaS is a building block that makes all of that possible.

Being agile and flexible enables organizations to pivot if need be to remain resilient. Mauro F. Guillen writes, in a recent HBR article, that “successful companies often pivot to a business model that’s conducive to short-term survival, and long-term resilience and growth. Pivoting is a lateral move that creates enough value for the customer and the firm to share.”

The focus is now on productivity, elasticity, and value to the customer. These are the main characteristics that will drive the proliferation of DaaS in business.

5
Reduces Upfront Costs

DaaS reduces enormous upfront costs. Imagine all the hardware you’d have to invest in just to get started. In-house IT infrastructure and computers have to be purchased and implemented with the next 3-5 years of business operations in mind. Recent events have shown that it is impossible to predict the next year much less project 3 to 5 years out.

Even during times of stability, it is often a challenge to budget for hardware replacement. CFOs have to also account for the depreciation of capital expenditures. From the moment you open the box on a new computer, the value depreciates. With many companies still in recovery mode, many are having to delay refreshes altogether, even at the risk of struggling with outdated technology.

DaaS provides the luxury of keeping IT aligned with workflows no matter how dynamic and volatile they may become.
Since DaaS is subscription-based, you’re renting equipment. This subscription-based model moves expenditures from a capital expenditure (CapEX) to an operational expenditure (OpEx). You’re only going to pay for what you use; therefore, if you use a lot, you’re going to pay more. Correspondingly, if you don’t use very much, you pay a minimum amount. This is a CFO’s dream come true because it streamlines operations in ways that lower overall operational costs.

CFOs love DaaS and other cloud-based solutions because of the budget predictability provided by packaged solutions but the fact that they can move CAPEX expenses into the OPEX column. This provides a range of financial and tax efficiencies. #1 in those efficiencies is that your company doesn’t have to pay a large amount of money for in-house servers and networks to be installed. And when your business grows, you don’t have to factor bigger, better servers (with bigger and better prices) into your budgets. Moving IT expenditures from CAPEX to OPEX gives you the flexibility to utilize your cash reserves for other, pro-growth initiatives. Having a fixed and predictable monthly fee certainly makes budgetary planning and forecasting much easier than the break and fix nature of on-premise servers or even in-house VPNs.

6
Energy Conservation Helps the Environment

You’re only one company, but you want to do your part for the environment – and you want your consumers to SEE you doing your part for the environment. Because DaaS allows you to use your devices for longer and to partner with eco-conscious cloud platforms, you can do your part for the planet without it costing you more to do so.

A study conducted by the Carbon Disclosure Project found companies that utilized cloud computing saved a total of $1.3 billion annually and reduced carbon emissions by an equivalent of 200 barrels of oil.

Just imagine the hardware and electrical power needs of even a small-size company. An organization saves tremendous amounts of energy by moving its IT system to a DaaS environment because no onsite servers are gobbling up massive amounts of electrical power. More employees working from home means fewer carbon emissions from vehicles traveling to and from work every day. When you start to consider the number of companies and the number of employees involved, the amount of carbon emissions is significant.

As our lives, work, and thinking turn increasingly towards protecting the climate, conserving energy by leveraging shared data centers will become more attractive and competitive. As this move to remote data centers matures, operators will begin to assess “greener” options for on-site power generation. Data centers are an excellent opportunity to integrate on-site energy generation facilities such as hydrogen applications, solar panels, or a combination of heat and power solutions (CHPs).

Marc Garner, VP of Schneider Electric’s Secure Power Division.

Marc Garner, VP of Schneider Electric’s Secure Power Division.The Vice President of Schneider Electric’s Secure Power Division, Marc Garner wrote in Data Center Dynamics, “Technology has become a key enabler for both businesses and consumers alike, and throughout 2020, dependency on digital infrastructure has increased dramatically. In fact by 2035, Schneider Electric estimates that all IT will consume 8.5 percent of global electricity – compared to 5 percent in 2021 – and data centers are expected to take up a large share of this demand. Many of today’s data center operators, from hyperscalers to cloud and colocation service providers, have already led the market by example, and publicly declared ambitious commitments towards Net Zero, adopting more sustainable approaches to digital business.

Microsoft, for example, has started transitioning to using renewable wind energy – a trend that will likely only continue to increase as awareness and demands for renewables from end-users and governments surge.”

Conclusion

Your business is moving into the future, whether your IT systems are ready for it or not. Using virtual desktops in a DaaS environment ensures you’re always working on the latest version of your operating system and applications. That in and of itself is a compelling reason to move to DaaS,

but that’s only the beginning. Consider that DaaS also gives you a built-in business continuity system. Because your data and workflow are securely housed in the cloud, you never have to worry about how much time, money, and lost opportunities you’d sacrifice if your company’s on-site server goes down.

As Gartner describes in a recent report, technologies utilized by organizations are increasingly conceptualized and implemented outside of the traditional outsourced IT department. Gartner found that the total business-led IT spend averaged around 36% of the total formal IT budget. Business leaders rightfully see digital transformation as an organization-wide discussion, and no longer the sole purview of the IT department.

This article categorized 6 key benefits for companies moving to DaaS. Depending on what priorities are driving your organization at the moment, you may be drawn to one specific DaaS advantage or another. Think about both short and long-term goals in your choice. You might consider DaaS to make hardware refresh more affordable in the short term but also reap the cost and business benefits delivered by DaaS as it has a deeper impact on the continued growth and success of your business long term.

The post The Six Key Benefits of Using Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) first appeared on IronOrbit.

If there’s a lesson to be learned about the pandemic, it’s the importance of being adaptable. Another critical quality for survival was speed. There wasn’t much time to deliberate. Companies had to act fast. Acting with speed and agility wasn’t tied to the size of the company. It was less about ability and more about choosing to be quick and adaptable.

Covid-19 changed how we live and work on multiple levels. We’ve seen accelerated changes in consumer and business behaviors that are likely to persist. Strategies meant to restore things as they were before the pandemic will prove frustrating.

Business leaders need to look beyond recovery. As Rebecca Brooks points out in her article for the Forbes Agency Council, the pandemic revealed the flaws in our systems. All of them. Whether they were socio-economic, corporate, or governmental. “That’s why I’m not trying to lead my company back to where it was in December of 2019,” she writes. “That place and time are gone. I want a renewal— not a recovery — so that our people are equipped and prepared to handle the challenges we’ll face today and tomorrow.

Because businesses and consumer behavior will never be the same, business leaders are looking for technology, specifically digital technology, to lead the way. Digitizing operations use the technology to replicate an existing service in a digital form. Becoming digital means using technology to transform the service into something significantly better. Companies can’t afford to drop the value propositions that work, at least not right away. Nor can they afford to settle with running the business as they had before the pandemic. It is a different market now. In this climate of rapid change and delivery, there’s nothing worse than complacency.

Be Inspired by Technology

The whole idea behind digital transformation is to leverage all the potentialities of technology (namely cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence) to create and deliver better products and services.

Why is the ability to be inspired by technology such a prized commodity? Because now you can conceive an idea, get it funded, bring it to life, and scale it easily, quickly, and more economical than ever before. Andrew Hessel, a distinguished research scientist at Autodesk, said, “The gap between science-fiction and science is getting really narrow now; as soon as someone has the idea and articulates it, it can be manifested in a short time.”

A recent Gartner report on identifying future work trends recommends several methods for creating a future-of-work strategy. The recommendations include using the visionary imaginations of science-fiction writers. Apparently, there are many organizations already employing science-fiction writers to develop bold ideas. Gartner points out that creative thinking is critical for moving past incremental innovation. People often become trapped by cognitive biases (what they know and expect from everyday experiences). They become unable to see potential futures because they are weighed down by the limitations of present conditions.

Market Trends

While the crisis of covid-19 has boosted innovations in technology, it has also created shock waves of uncertainty which are particularly felt by investors and multinational companies. Having witnessed the vulnerability of long-distance supply chains, many business leaders are looking for more local options to replace global manufacturing partners.

ZARA, one of the most known retail companies in the world, has built its success on a solid cloud-based infrastructure.

The Spanish clothing retailer ZARA, founded in 1975, is one company that has been ahead of the trend. While most clothing brands floundered during the pandemic, ZARA was able to keep things moving because they had a shorter supply chain. Not an easy feat to pull off, especially when you have 2,270 stores worldwide. Most western brands use offshore manufacturing in Asia, where labor is much cheaper. The time between design and delivery of the finished product could be months.

Because ZARA used local manufacturers, they moved quickly from design to delivery in a matter of weeks. ZARA also benefited from having no stockpiles of unsold inventory, and they were able to respond to consumer trends promptly. This strategy of using local suppliers turns out to be an effective model. Other companies: in other industries have begun to follow its example.

Job Growth

The clothing industry was one of the markets hit the hardest during the pandemic. The manufacturing of clothing requires the work of many people. Consider that, in Asia alone, the clothing industry employs 43 million people. So, when clothing sales fall 73.5 % in the United States, Bangladesh loses out on $3.2 Billion in canceled clothing exports.

Worldwide, factory jobs will soon be a thing of the past because everything has been automated. Low-skill labor of all kinds will slowly continue to disappear over the next decade. It is anticipated that 1 out of 16 people will have to change occupations between now and 2030. This era of occupational transitions will require the need to train millions of people for new jobs. What benefits, such as sick leave or unemployment, be available for all workers (including gig workers)? The main areas of job growth will be highly skilled occupations: including teachers and training instructors.

Consumer Behavior

According to McKinsey & Company, consumer behavior that shifted in response to Covid-19: such as ordering groceries online and virtual healthcare, will continue at higher levels. E-commerce is booming. The virus also initiated a reversal of some behaviors, such as investing in the home. As the pandemic subsides, some consumer behaviors disrupted by Covid-19, including entertainment, leisure air travel, and remote education, will eventually make their comeback.

Hybrid or Fully Remote Workforce

McKinsey and Company assessed over two thousand work activities to evaluate what work can be done without any activity loss in a work-from-home environment. In their research, twenty to twenty-five percent of the workforces in advanced economies were able to operate effectively without losing any of their efficiency. The number of remote workers since the pandemic has increased four to five times. Companies are now devising hybrid remote work plans that enable them to reduce office space saving money and increasing profit margins while giving workers more location flexibility.

During a video roundtable discussion entitled “What’s Up AEC?” Nvidia’s Senior Solutions Architect, Jimmy Rotella, said, “We had always seen a remote workforce coming. Analysts say that the pandemic has actually accelerated the work-from-home movement by 5 to 10 years.”

Now, there is a real focus on employees having options. They can work from home, in the office or both. In fact, the “employee experience” has become equally important as the customer experience.  Providing a great experience to both customers and employees is a defining aspect of a company’s brand.

According to a Fuze survey:

·       83% of workers do not believe they need to be in an office to be productive

·       43% believe they would be more productive working from home

·       70% of those surveyed between the ages of 16–44 want to be more mobile at work

·       88% use smartphones for work daily

·       49% use a tablet minimum of three times per week.

Now that the pandemic is winding down, organizations continue to think about how they want to work moving forward. Most employees now have a taste of what it’s like to work from home, and they want to keep it that way if possible. The trend for most companies has shifted in favor of remote and hybrid working scenarios. Owen Hughes writes, in his attention-grabbing article SPENDING ON TECH IS ABOUT TO ROCKET. BUT IT WON’T BE THE IT DEPARTMENT DOING THE BUYING, that the growth in IT spending will be around companies digitizing operations (moving to the cloud) and becoming digital.

Welcome to 2025

& Tech-Celeration

Zipline has made more than 150,000 commercial drone deliveries including blood, medicines, and vaccines. It has transformed national health systems by expanding access to care for millions of people.

The post-pandemic acceleration in the adoption of technologies is pushing us into the future at breakneck speeds.  The new word for this rapid adoption of new technologies is tech-celeration. Experts estimate the acceleration is at least 5 years. Healthcare and higher education are among the industries that have probably seen the greatest push towards tech-celeration. For example, in the United Kingdom, the National Health Service built a telehealth system over a weekend and rolled it out to doctors across the country by the end of the following week. There were similar scenarios in the United States.

Although e-learning has been available to the public since 2000, it has been relatively dormant in university settings until the pandemic. Now, the online education market is expected to quadruple in revenue by 2026. Educational institutions are more open to using computers for distance learning and developing more robust online degree programs.

IT Moves to Center Stage

According to analysts, the surge in IT spending this year won’t come from traditional IT departments, but other areas of the business undergoing digital transformation. These units see IT charged as a cost of revenue or cost of goods sold.

John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, said: “IT no longer just supports corporate operations as it traditionally has, but is fully participating in business value delivery. Not only does this shift IT from a back-office role to the front of a business, but it also changes the source of funding from an overhead expense that is maintained, monitored, and sometimes cut, to the thing that drives revenue.”

Mark Samuels’ May 22, 2018, article warns readers of the many pitfalls associated with digital transformation even as it acknowledges its importance to business renewal. A few years later, this urgency to transform into digital companies is as intense as ever. Like the acceleration of remote work, the pandemic pushed up the digital transformation agenda for everyone.

For more information please read parts 1 and 2 of WHY IS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SO IMPORTANT TO SUSTAINED SUCCESS? These highly informative blogs were based on research by Jeanne W. Ross.

New Crisis. New Opportunities.

Covid-19 created the opportunity for new businesses, as well as new types of businesses to emerge. According to the earlier referenced survey, the number of new business start-ups has doubled in the USA since 2019. During Covid-19, however, many workers in the United States were furloughed, laid off, or simply dropped out of the labor force for other reasons, and thereby embraced the opportunity to create the start-up of their dreams. New job titles have appeared on the horizon. For example, the research company Econsultancy tracked the use of the chief data officer title on LinkedIn for two years. In April 2016, 2,899 people were identified as chief data officers; by February 2018, there were 11,418.

IN CONCLUSION

Because of the changes brought upon by the pandemic digitization increased faster than ever thought to be possible and pressured many companies to move faster than they would have liked. It is now an on-demand economy (compliments of the cloud ecosystem). This is a new industrial revolution driven both by fear of digital disruption and the opportunities created by the cloud ecosystem.

The disruption caused by Covid-19 also offers a path to higher productivity and broad-based growth. Digital enterprises like Netflix, Google, and Facebook will only continue to get bigger. The Amazon model of fast and direct delivery will continue to blaze a path through online shopping.

Although the pandemic has contributed to a slowdown of globalization, the world has grown too integrated for globalization to be stopped. According to The Economist magazine, the biggest missing piece of the global puzzle is for business and government leaders to make interdependence work with resilience. Technology, and how people use it, will surely play a critical role.

Even before the pandemic lockdown, social media, mobile, analytics, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things pressured companies to become more digital. Digital technologies deliver ubiquitous data, unlimited connectivity, and massive processing power. Digital technologies enhance both the customer experience as well as employees.

Becoming a digital company means delivering new and improved product features. Too many executives rush into transforming their companies to become digital. Digital business transformation is a long journey. Leaders need to commit to the long haul while sustaining existing business.

Take notice of industry trends and identify which ones will have the biggest impact on your organization. Identify where your company has the greatest competitive advantages. Play to those strengths. Build relationships with providers who are dedicated to your success and whose expertise you can leverage.

The post Post-Pandemic Business Success is About Renewal first appeared on IronOrbit.