2023 WFH Predictions

Since WFH (Work from Home) and remote work impact IT Ops and application performance, APMdigest is following up our list of 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions with predictions from industry experts about how WFH will impact work and application performance in 2023.

REMOTE WORK STAYS THE NORM

I'm biased. I've worked from home since 1990, when it was a rarity — rare enough that there was even an article about me in some statewide business paper. Yes, there are people like Elon Musk who are trying to force everyone back into the office. I don't think they'll succeed, and I don't think there's any reason for them to succeed. O'Reilly is now completely distributed. We don't have any problems keeping our site up. I believe that any site that wants remote work to succeed can make it succeed. Particularly for things like site development and management: it's all in the cloud. What does going to an office mean when all the infrastructure is remote? At the same time, there are lots of companies where management doesn't believe that remote work can succeed. For those companies, that will be self-fulfilling.
Mike Loukides
VP of Emerging Tech Content, O'Reilly Media

THE HYBRID MODEL

The hybrid model is going to be a buzzword in 2023. However, with global economic uncertainty, most companies are looking for a cost-efficient option best delivered with a remote yet productive workforce. Issues pertaining to productivity are subjective, but companies can manage them by investing in a robust workforce productivity model. This model efficiently utilizes the existing workforce's capabilities to achieve maximum productivity. The companies must prepare a detailed roadmap to invest in the infrastructure, tools and workforce productivity technologies that enable hybrid models to deliver the much-needed balance between excellence and strategy.
Bhavin Sankhat
Delivery Manager Collaboration, Synoptek

EMPLOYEES DEMAND WFH

WFH and remote work are now considered the norm among most companies. This hybrid work model can only succeed if applications deliver adequate performance, at minimum. This includes collaboration via unified communications apps like Teams and Zoom. Organizations will offer WFH/remote work as "table stakes" for many of their employees. Otherwise, workers will leave and prospective new hires will choose to work elsewhere. Hence, WFH and remote work will become expected by job seekers and demanded by many existing employees, and organizations will simply have to offer it to stay competitive.
Dan O'Farrell
VP of Product Marketing, IGEL

FOCUS ON REMOTE APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

While the debate between remote and on-premises work environments rages, the fact that application performance remains critical is often lost in the conversation. Where someone works from, while potentially important, is, in reality, less important than how the applications and services that employee uses perform wherever they are working from. Organizations that do not continue to invest in tools to monitor the performance of applications for their remote workers will find themselves struggling in comparison to other organizations that do invest in such technologies. Because employee productivity can be directly tied to the performance of an application, understanding how remote workers are experiencing applications, why they are having those experiences, and developing remediation plans for employees who struggle, will directly impact corporate productivity and by extension the success of the organization.
Josh Chessman
VP, Strategy & Innovation, Netreo

ONLINE HUB IS THE WORKPLACE OF THE FUTURE

Online and hybrid work is here to stay and digital workplace technology must evolve or team productivity, business processes and customer service will suffer. New digital workplace technology platforms that effectively combine project management, data-driven features, content management, chat and discussions can eliminate wasted time switching between multiple apps. The digital workplace of the future will become an essential online hub, replacing the physical office with effective team collaboration. In the new online hub, teams have visibility, can resolve issues, manage and track tasks and processes, and react in a relevant way.
Dean Guida
CEO, Infragistics

APPRECIATING THE HUMAN ELEMENT

With the future of work still in flux, we'll see continued efforts to manage global workloads while appreciating the human element behind our work.
Ryan Worobel
Chief Information Officer, LogicMonitor

BLURRING THE LINE BETWEEN WORK AND PERSONAL COMPUTING

Going into 2023 the changing job market is shifting some power back to employers. Even so, the quest for top talent will endure and companies will continue to invest in flexible work conditions and technology to attract and retain the best talent. The line between work and personal computing will become increasingly blurred in 2023. End users will expect to use their devices for personal matters and corporate work, side by side. This will increase the need for IT to focus on endpoint and remote work security to protect corporate data while enabling the best and most productive remote work experience for users.
Amol Dalvi
VP, Product, Nerdio

COLLABORATION SOLUTIONS

Efficiency will be a priority in the coming year for companies that are looking to solidify their position in this new world of work. Short-term fixes for communication and workflow issues are no longer enough. While many companies pay down years of tech debt, there's an opportunity for all companies to review which solutions are worth the long-term investment or worth terminating due to low ROI. To stay agile in their unique markets, companies will need to prioritize solutions that empower effective collaboration for permanent hybrid workforces — which is where visual collaboration platforms become invaluable in aligning teams.
David Torgerson
VP of Infrastructure and IT, Lucid Software

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The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...

2023 WFH Predictions

Since WFH (Work from Home) and remote work impact IT Ops and application performance, APMdigest is following up our list of 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions with predictions from industry experts about how WFH will impact work and application performance in 2023.

REMOTE WORK STAYS THE NORM

I'm biased. I've worked from home since 1990, when it was a rarity — rare enough that there was even an article about me in some statewide business paper. Yes, there are people like Elon Musk who are trying to force everyone back into the office. I don't think they'll succeed, and I don't think there's any reason for them to succeed. O'Reilly is now completely distributed. We don't have any problems keeping our site up. I believe that any site that wants remote work to succeed can make it succeed. Particularly for things like site development and management: it's all in the cloud. What does going to an office mean when all the infrastructure is remote? At the same time, there are lots of companies where management doesn't believe that remote work can succeed. For those companies, that will be self-fulfilling.
Mike Loukides
VP of Emerging Tech Content, O'Reilly Media

THE HYBRID MODEL

The hybrid model is going to be a buzzword in 2023. However, with global economic uncertainty, most companies are looking for a cost-efficient option best delivered with a remote yet productive workforce. Issues pertaining to productivity are subjective, but companies can manage them by investing in a robust workforce productivity model. This model efficiently utilizes the existing workforce's capabilities to achieve maximum productivity. The companies must prepare a detailed roadmap to invest in the infrastructure, tools and workforce productivity technologies that enable hybrid models to deliver the much-needed balance between excellence and strategy.
Bhavin Sankhat
Delivery Manager Collaboration, Synoptek

EMPLOYEES DEMAND WFH

WFH and remote work are now considered the norm among most companies. This hybrid work model can only succeed if applications deliver adequate performance, at minimum. This includes collaboration via unified communications apps like Teams and Zoom. Organizations will offer WFH/remote work as "table stakes" for many of their employees. Otherwise, workers will leave and prospective new hires will choose to work elsewhere. Hence, WFH and remote work will become expected by job seekers and demanded by many existing employees, and organizations will simply have to offer it to stay competitive.
Dan O'Farrell
VP of Product Marketing, IGEL

FOCUS ON REMOTE APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

While the debate between remote and on-premises work environments rages, the fact that application performance remains critical is often lost in the conversation. Where someone works from, while potentially important, is, in reality, less important than how the applications and services that employee uses perform wherever they are working from. Organizations that do not continue to invest in tools to monitor the performance of applications for their remote workers will find themselves struggling in comparison to other organizations that do invest in such technologies. Because employee productivity can be directly tied to the performance of an application, understanding how remote workers are experiencing applications, why they are having those experiences, and developing remediation plans for employees who struggle, will directly impact corporate productivity and by extension the success of the organization.
Josh Chessman
VP, Strategy & Innovation, Netreo

ONLINE HUB IS THE WORKPLACE OF THE FUTURE

Online and hybrid work is here to stay and digital workplace technology must evolve or team productivity, business processes and customer service will suffer. New digital workplace technology platforms that effectively combine project management, data-driven features, content management, chat and discussions can eliminate wasted time switching between multiple apps. The digital workplace of the future will become an essential online hub, replacing the physical office with effective team collaboration. In the new online hub, teams have visibility, can resolve issues, manage and track tasks and processes, and react in a relevant way.
Dean Guida
CEO, Infragistics

APPRECIATING THE HUMAN ELEMENT

With the future of work still in flux, we'll see continued efforts to manage global workloads while appreciating the human element behind our work.
Ryan Worobel
Chief Information Officer, LogicMonitor

BLURRING THE LINE BETWEEN WORK AND PERSONAL COMPUTING

Going into 2023 the changing job market is shifting some power back to employers. Even so, the quest for top talent will endure and companies will continue to invest in flexible work conditions and technology to attract and retain the best talent. The line between work and personal computing will become increasingly blurred in 2023. End users will expect to use their devices for personal matters and corporate work, side by side. This will increase the need for IT to focus on endpoint and remote work security to protect corporate data while enabling the best and most productive remote work experience for users.
Amol Dalvi
VP, Product, Nerdio

COLLABORATION SOLUTIONS

Efficiency will be a priority in the coming year for companies that are looking to solidify their position in this new world of work. Short-term fixes for communication and workflow issues are no longer enough. While many companies pay down years of tech debt, there's an opportunity for all companies to review which solutions are worth the long-term investment or worth terminating due to low ROI. To stay agile in their unique markets, companies will need to prioritize solutions that empower effective collaboration for permanent hybrid workforces — which is where visual collaboration platforms become invaluable in aligning teams.
David Torgerson
VP of Infrastructure and IT, Lucid Software

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...