By Emanuel Pirker

Emanuel Pirker

What an incredible couple of years it has been! From a global perspective, the pandemic has changed the way many of us interact and live our lives on a daily basis. From a technology perspective, the dynamic changes have been extraordinary.

As we all know, in 2020 corporations globally faced an incredible shift to remote work. Today, remote work has even become something of a status symbol and will continue to have a resounding impact on the world of work well beyond the end of this pandemic.

But in many ways, remote work has seen its zenith. The future is about hybrid work.

Already, business leaders around the world are clamoring for solutions to efficiently and effectively support an already existing hybrid work environment, while others are doubling down on efforts to reinvent their workforce structure permanently to hybrid. They recognize the joint benefit that such a model can offer their dispersed work forces – enabling the flexibility that employees crave while preserving the “tried and true” productivity of well-worn work processes.

Future Work Model

Ultimately, hybrid work is the work model of the future, and it is here to stay. Of course, for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) leaders and end user computing (EUC) endpoint software providers, this is good news. Enterprise IT will continue to rely on the convenience of access and security that VDI affords them.

As COVID morphs into new variants, it’s safe to assume the year ahead will bring with it many changes. The largest among these challenges will be enabling a successful hybrid work deployment.

As a result of this shift and the investment companies made in purchasing low-cost, unmanaged laptops during the pandemic, IT departments will begin to feel the pain and burden of their disparate fleet of endpoints, and will start looking to VDI and desktop as a service (DaaS) to solve their problems.

Any company looking to leverage hybrid work on any level (and the majority of companies and business leaders desire a hybrid return-to-work strategy) will need to dust off their existing PCs. Take that combined with the now countless devices orphaned by Windows 11 and you have the perfect cataclysm for an unprecedented surge in demand for VDI and DaaS.

The VDI and DaaS community has been heralding the importance of enabling secure, flexible work from anywhere for more than a decade. In many ways, the onset of the pandemic saw that reality come to fruition. The return to work, and the need for hybrid work – the inherent need for organizations to easily control and manage the entirety of their dispersed workforces – will create demand for VDI and DaaS that even the most seasoned veterans haven’t yet experienced.

Those who have been following VDI, DaaS and even EUC’s swift rise to the forefront of the hybrid work discussion will be familiar with the many groundbreaking innovations that have been made in enabling smarter workspaces.

As we head deeper into the new and brave frontier of workplaces without bounds, hybrid workforces, and all the complexity that lies therein, we will begin to see enterprise IT truly embrace smarter work solutions. That means leaders will begin to make processes better and flexible work more enjoyable and productive for workers and ultimately, their entire organization, as compared with what happened at the beginning of the pandemic where many enterprises were forced to shift countless workers from in office to remote overnight, acting in crisis mode.

Existing VDI and DaaS leaders are in position to serve these demands. Thanks to the innovation from technology leaders including Citrix, Microsoft, Nutanix and VMware, I can assuredly say these solution providers are well-positioned to handle and energize this surge in demand for smarter workplace solutions, and the increase in demand for VDI and DaaS.

An added advantage today’s enterprises are experiencing is also the lowered entry bar for VDI, also made possible by the new Windows 365. Thanks to these combined efforts and innovations, the world of VDI and DaaS has never been more accessible.

In short, the economic environment and dynamic world stage have led to a series of events that will drive the further explosion of the VDI market as we head deeper into the 2020s. Many of the things that were on hold so far will finally get triggered in 2022. Here is to an incredible year for VDI, DaaS and EUC.

Emanuel Pirker, founder and CEO of Stratodesk, brings over 20 years of technology and entrepreneurial leadership experience to his roles as software architect and strategic product development leader, including stints as a software engineer, developer and managing director. You may follow him on LinkedIn or @stratodesk on Twitter.