By Laura Whalen, Head of Community, and Michael Keen, Director of Cloud Solution Architecture, Workspot
Technological changes are coming at breakneck speed, leaving many organizations with barely a chance to catch their breath. The need to adapt and innovate is a sink-or-swim challenge, meaning business models have had to become increasingly dynamic.
A good metaphor for what’s happening in the overall industry is what we saw in the music industry in the past few decades.
It used to be that if you wanted to listen to music at home, your only options were the radio or LPs. And that was the case for decades, before eight-track tapes came along, followed quickly by the likes of tape cassettes and CDs. But all these things were still physical recordings that sat on our shelves – and industry innovation centered around the physical devices that delivered the music. Think the invention of the boom box or the Walkman.
And then came the rise of the MP3. With the cutting-edge capabilities of digital technology, companies old and new started reimagining consumers’ method of music consumption. Those physical recordings started taking a backseat to new, simpler ways of delivering music virtually. And these new forms of delivery created a new market, pricing models and strategic partnerships. Think about how groundbreaking the first iPods were, for instance.
Many tried and failed, and after the carnage of Napster, Milk Music, Rdio and the rest of the now-defunct services in the online streaming space, we came through to the other side, with Spotify, Pandora and a handful of others as the musical juggernauts of the early 21st century. There is a hypothesis in evolutionary biology called punctuated equilibrium, which highlights isolated episodes of rapid speciation between long periods of little or no change. Just like the music industry had experienced when they were focused on physical devices. Just like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has experienced for over a decade.
Tech experts announced the “Year of VDI” each year, starting in about 2009 and lasting until 2014 – much as they have done with 5G more recently. In a sense, they were right, as the limits of what could be done at that time with the technologies that made up that solution were tested and pushed. VDI had seen slow and steady – almost Darwinian – growth over the years, but it still hadn’t taken hold and gained a proper place at the table of strategic importance in the enterprise. Why? Because despite the promise of secure, centralized virtual desktops that were easier to provision and manage, the reality of on-premises VDI became clearer over time. On-prem VDI is expensive to provision, complex to manage, and difficult to troubleshoot when things go wrong. Further, it’s designed for a single datacenter. When users are remote, performance suffers due to latency. However, the rapid evolution of the public cloud is giving virtual desktops new life.
Organizations across many industries are using the public cloud to fundamentally alter industry economics and redefine the notion of competitive advantage. The most creative, successful IT leaders don’t aspire to learn from the best-in-class in their industry – especially when the best-in-class aren’t pushing past the comfortable constraints of what’s been done before. Instead, they learn from companies far outside their field to shake things up and make lasting, innovative change happen. In an increasingly nonlinear world, only nonlinear ideas are poised to establish a competitive edge.
Sudden, widespread change sometimes forces innovation’s hand, as the global shift to remote work demonstrated to the end-user computing industry. The old way of building and managing a virtual desktop solution made from bits and bobs of on-premises infrastructure is still around, but there has been a tectonic shift over the past few years to modernize and deliver virtual desktops and workstations from the public cloud.
This rapid shift massively upset the business world’s apple cart and revealed how woefully underprepared many organizations were to enable remote work. Delivering a reliable desktop experience to their workers who had suddenly been sent home became a top priority practically overnight, and IT teams no longer have the flexibility to experiment with the various desktop delivery solutions on the market. The time is now to move forward with one that best meets their current and future needs.
As a baseline, a virtual desktop solution should:
- Meet the needs of the organization’s workforce, from power users to contractors to task workers
- Enable device independence and work-from-anywhere flexibility
- Make it possible to deliver desktops in the cloud region closest to each user, without having to provision and manage solutions independently in each region
- Have the capability to scale in every direction effortlessly
- Integrate seamlessly with IT’s existing systems and desktop management processes
- Empower customers to be up-and-running in days
- Provide multi-region, multi-cloud backup and disaster recovery for business continuity
- Have a predictable pricing model
- Deliver uptime guarantees and a desktop SLA
Solutions that leverage global, hyperscale public clouds offer IT organizations the flexibility and agility required to survive and thrive in these uncertain times. These solutions can enable IT teams to break through the traditional ways they’ve worked. Complex, static modes of functioning will never create innovation and competitive edge, as the music industry shows. The public cloud has proven itself not only useful but in some ways revolutionary, and the past year underscored the need for its agility and scalability. Some tech companies started out as cloud-native and were able to surf the wave of disruption. The rest will need to innovate such that their products and services make use of the public cloud or risk becoming as irrelevant as a cassette tape.
About the authors
Laura Whalen is an IT thought leader and community building pioneer, who began her tech career on the engineering side, producing high-profile product documentation. Over a decade ago, she brought her technical know-how to the marketing side, running global marketing teams, and driving best-in-class community and social media programs for end-user computing companies, including Citrix and Nutanix. She has continued her marketing and community leadership in the industry, and now leads global community development at Workspot, the leader in the cloud-native DaaS space. For more information visit www.workspot.com
Leveraging his background in professional mountaineering and as a Wall Street trader, Michael Keen weaves his unique experiences into customer engagements that move the needle in empowering IT executives to collaborate to drive business value and growth. As Director of Cloud Solution Architecture at Workspot, Michael brings an "outside in" approach to working with customers, applying his experiences and expertise to help IT organizations develop new, technology-enabled capabilities that create higher value, and a whole new level of innovation for IT and the business.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.