3. Agencies Will Re-Evaluate Their Needs for Client Virtualization
Desktop as a Service — one of the main types of client virtualization — is poised for growth in 2023. Research from Gartner shows that spending on DaaS will continue to climb, driven by ongoing cloud migration. DaaS came to prominence during the pandemic because it enabled agencies to scale up quickly and relatively inexpensively to support employees who were working remotely.
Although most government employees are making their way back to the office, IT leaders need to maintain flexibility to support them wherever they are working in 2023.
It would be wise for agencies to evaluate their needs before going all in on DaaS. Like most IT solutions, client virtualization is not one-size-fits-all.
For example, agencies that need to scale up or down quickly should consider DaaS. Suppliers can equip agency employees with hardware and applications, manage those assets and dispose of them. Agencies also benefit from flexible cloud space on demand. Subscription costs for DaaS also scale up or down with the agency’s need for services.
Organizations with skilled IT teams and the resources to continually manage software and hardware, as well as those with higher security needs, might pass up DaaS for a different type of client virtualization, such as virtual desktop infrastructure.
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4. Device Lifecycle Management Will Help with Compliance
Federal agency IT leaders must equip employees for success as they work from virtually anywhere. Add a dizzying rate of change for devices, and IT teams have their hands full managing and security the organization’s data while staying compliant.
“There are so many things you have to comply with, and they keep coming all the time,” says Sean Frazier, federal chief security officer at Okta. “First, take a step back, realize all these are kind of related and focus on the fundamentals.”
With device lifecycle management — with any kind of lifecycle management, really — it’s best to start at the beginning. “We have to be thinking for everything we build, from the time that we have it as a thought in our brain, we should be planning what the security is for that architecture,” Frazier says. “We have to be thinking about the security implications.”
For some agencies, working with a trusted partner can help IT leaders manage their devices, keep them up to date and shore up compliance. CDW can provide such support throughout the four pillars of the device lifecycle: discover and design, deploy, manage, and refresh and recover.
