Security has become more difficult, IT leaders say

Workspot announced a survey report conducted by Dimensional Research, which reveals that in the past year, due to remote work, 83% of IT leaders expanded or accelerated their cloud strategies, while still facing increasing challenges with security (71%), and concerns about employee compliance to new controls (60%). With that in mind, budgets are expected to increase throughout the year to improve remote work technologies.

Hybrid work has impacted technology, solutions, and strategies IT leaders relied on. From conferencing to remote access, new iterations of technologies have been adopted, but with that, new challenges have come up. In this context, Workspot’s report looks at how experiences, strategies, and technology used for supporting remote workers are delivering value today, including challenges IT decision-makers are still facing and expectations on what to invest in for adapting computing, security, and new collaboration capabilities.

“IT leaders continue to face many challenges in the midst of the new workplace paradigm, but through this process they have realized the power of the cloud,” said Amitabh Sinha, CEO at Workspot.

“Our report sheds light on some major pain points and also where leaders have excelled in the past year. To continue supporting the ‘anywhere’ workforce, more established strategies around cloud migration, VDI modernization, and implementation of SaaS applications become mainstream to help future-looking organizations evolve for years to come.”

As remote work and hybrid environments continue to accelerate digital transformation, the report provides insights into three key areas that have challenged IT leaders and the steps they have taken to mitigate risk and future-proof their business.

Support of remote workers creates increasing challenges for IT

• It comes as no surprise that 99% of respondents agreed. Among the main challenges, they highlighted maintaining security across environments (71%), ensuring employee compliance to new controls (60%), and ensuring device performance (59%).
• IT budgets have also changed in the past year, in fact, leaders expect to see an increase in allocations to control the impact of remote work with security at the top, closely followed by SaaS and collaboration tools. Despite this increase, only 30% report they have all the resources they need to enable remote work.

Shifts in cloud adoption, security, and productivity

• Remote work drove increased cloud adoption and strategies with 35% expanding the scope of their strategy and 47% accelerating timelines in their established strategy.
• Among the benefits of SaaS and cloud, 65% of respondents highlighted scalability while 59% and 56% mentioned reduced requirements for on-prem investments and improved business continuity and reliability respectively.
• Across all industries, the report found security was more difficult. Although security became a priority, challenges continue to daunt leaders – especially around new tools and strategies for the expanded security perimeter (67%) and securing user devices outside the corporate firewall (54%).

Contribution of virtual desktop technology to remote work

• Specific technologies adopted or expanded during the pandemic had an impact on the business bottom line. In fact, 61% agree that DaaS or Cloud PCs would be beneficial in increasing remote worker productivity moving forward.
• Over half of the respondents said they relied on VDI to support remote work and 33% leveraged DaaS, Cloud VDI, and Cloud PC.
• The fewer the desktops managed, the more likely the organization adopted or expanded on-prem VDI. Larger organizations (with more than 5,000 desktops), however, opted for DaaS, Cloud VDI and Cloud PC.

Beyond technology adoption and the challenges noted, leaders are seeing budgets shift positively, with security and cloud services leading the investments. They are also seeing the increasing benefits from the flexibility remote work brings to employees in terms of talent recruitment and retention, 76% of executives confirm it has helped significantly.