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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

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...