IT Organizations Rethink Strategies for Enabling Hybrid Work

Forced by the pandemic to provide employees with access to the systems and information they needed to work from home, IT organizations around the world turned to traditional technologies like Virtual Private Networks (VPN). And they worked. But as the world moves to hybrid work, 96% of IT leaders who participated in a recent global survey conducted by Gartner Peer Insights on behalf of Citrix Systems, Inc., say they no longer cut it. And they're rethinking their approach.

A Seismic Change

Hybrid models have radically changed where and how work gets done — and even who does it. Of the organizations who participated in the poll:

■ 96% have a hybrid work policy or allow both fully remote and hybrid work

■ 85% say their workforce is more geographically dispersed than it was two years ago

■ 75% have seen an increase in the number of seasonal, contract, or freelance workers

A Major Miss

When it comes to supporting these changes, respondents say the solutions they put in place to enable remote work fall short in the following areas:

■ Fail to protect against additional security risks posed by employees working from anywhere (96%)

■ Create a digital divide between in-office and remote employees (63%)

■ Don't provide a consistent user experience (46%)

■ Hinder efficient collaboration among distributed employees (46%)

■ Don't support bring-your-own-device initiatives (33%)

■ Difficult to scale and manage (25%)

A Strategic Shift

And they are increasing their investments in technologies that allow them to provide a simpler, more consistent and secure experience for employees regardless of where they work, including:

■ Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) (69%)

■ Virtual apps and desktops (56%)

■ Desktops as a Service (DaaS) (42%)

■ Zero trust network access (34%)

A Layered Approach

VPN remains the most popular solution to support remote work. But as the research reveals, it's not enough to enable safe and productive hybrid work on its own. According to the poll, 87 percent of respondents using VPN have implemented at least one other solution to close the gaps, including:

■ VDI (69%)

■ Virtual Apps and Desktops (49%)

■ DaaS (39%)

Desired Results

And in doing so, they're achieving their goal. When asked to identify the top three benefits their hybrid work solutions provide, participants in the poll said they:

■ Provide layered protection for all devices on the network, including unmanaged and BYOD

■ Create an equitable work experience by providing employees with consistent and reliable access to applications and data regardless of where they are working

■ Provide layered protection and consistent security management for all applications

"Hybrid work is the future of work" said Tim Minahan, EVP of Strategy, Citrix. "Innovative organizations recognize this and are reimagining the solutions used to support it so they can deliver it today."

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IT Organizations Rethink Strategies for Enabling Hybrid Work

Forced by the pandemic to provide employees with access to the systems and information they needed to work from home, IT organizations around the world turned to traditional technologies like Virtual Private Networks (VPN). And they worked. But as the world moves to hybrid work, 96% of IT leaders who participated in a recent global survey conducted by Gartner Peer Insights on behalf of Citrix Systems, Inc., say they no longer cut it. And they're rethinking their approach.

A Seismic Change

Hybrid models have radically changed where and how work gets done — and even who does it. Of the organizations who participated in the poll:

■ 96% have a hybrid work policy or allow both fully remote and hybrid work

■ 85% say their workforce is more geographically dispersed than it was two years ago

■ 75% have seen an increase in the number of seasonal, contract, or freelance workers

A Major Miss

When it comes to supporting these changes, respondents say the solutions they put in place to enable remote work fall short in the following areas:

■ Fail to protect against additional security risks posed by employees working from anywhere (96%)

■ Create a digital divide between in-office and remote employees (63%)

■ Don't provide a consistent user experience (46%)

■ Hinder efficient collaboration among distributed employees (46%)

■ Don't support bring-your-own-device initiatives (33%)

■ Difficult to scale and manage (25%)

A Strategic Shift

And they are increasing their investments in technologies that allow them to provide a simpler, more consistent and secure experience for employees regardless of where they work, including:

■ Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) (69%)

■ Virtual apps and desktops (56%)

■ Desktops as a Service (DaaS) (42%)

■ Zero trust network access (34%)

A Layered Approach

VPN remains the most popular solution to support remote work. But as the research reveals, it's not enough to enable safe and productive hybrid work on its own. According to the poll, 87 percent of respondents using VPN have implemented at least one other solution to close the gaps, including:

■ VDI (69%)

■ Virtual Apps and Desktops (49%)

■ DaaS (39%)

Desired Results

And in doing so, they're achieving their goal. When asked to identify the top three benefits their hybrid work solutions provide, participants in the poll said they:

■ Provide layered protection for all devices on the network, including unmanaged and BYOD

■ Create an equitable work experience by providing employees with consistent and reliable access to applications and data regardless of where they are working

■ Provide layered protection and consistent security management for all applications

"Hybrid work is the future of work" said Tim Minahan, EVP of Strategy, Citrix. "Innovative organizations recognize this and are reimagining the solutions used to support it so they can deliver it today."

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If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

Why AI Is the Differentiator for Operationally Resilient Organizations

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How AI Becomes an Operational Advantage

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

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The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...