Skip to main content

Cloud Ahead – Managing Change in the New Normal

Employees are no longer bound to a physical desk in the office due to moving to the cloud
Dennis Damen
Login VSI

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.

Dennis Damen is Sr. Product Manager at Login VSI

Hot Topics

The Latest

A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

Image
Cisco

The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Cloud Ahead – Managing Change in the New Normal

Employees are no longer bound to a physical desk in the office due to moving to the cloud
Dennis Damen
Login VSI

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.

Dennis Damen is Sr. Product Manager at Login VSI

Hot Topics

The Latest

A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

Image
Cisco

The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...