IT is Making a Major Shift from Devices to Digital Workspaces

There is no question that personal computing has evolved greatly since its mainstream introduction into business. Since Liquidware was born in 2009, we personally have seen the introduction of VDI, the extension of remote desktop delivery technologies,  proliferating SaaS and DaaS applications and cloud.  The nature of personal devices and apps has changed dramatically.  Today, the IT landscape is so altered that  even the term “desktops” has become outmoded.

Today, we tend to use the term “digital workspace,” which essentially refers to  an integrated technology framework designed to deliver and manage app, data, and desktop delivery. It allows employees to access their apps and data remotely and in real-time – on any device, from any location, at any time,  regardless of whether the information is stored through cloud services or in the data center.

The Pandemic Pushed the Pedal on Digital Workspaces

The advent of all these  developments were already driving companies to explore the limits of remote work and flexible digital workspaces.   Many organizations wanted to bring applications and data processing closer to the “action,” so industries  like healthcare, education, law enforcement, inventory management and logistics, for example, could access and transfer data immediately in the location where work needed to be performed.

However, the pandemic hitting the globe in 2020, accelerated the push to remote work more aggressively than any other single force.   Mainly because – for many organizations —  it was a matter of survival.   With many more employees working off-site, digital workspaces became the rule, not the exception.  However, managing digital workspaces is very different from managing desktops and requires an IT staff to make a cultural shift in management techniques.   With digital workspaces, pretty much all of the computing and data management is abstracted and stored in data centers or the cloud, not local machines. It runs on shared, not discrete, systems.  The digital workspaces framework needs a purpose-built solution in order to provide visibility into these abstractions and shared systems.   And so, as devices transitioned to digital workspaces, the need for a new breed of monitoring solution called digital experience monitoring has also arisen.

Digital Workspaces Gives Rise to Digital Experience Monitoring

With the use of cloud and SaaS applications dramatically increasing, the focus has shifted from systems monitoring to Digital Experience Monitoring or  DEM, which goes beyond servers and storage to include end point devices, third party applications, infrastructure, and networks.   DEM solutions coordinate metrics data across all of these in order to provide a true and complete picture of the user experience including the local devices and last-mile networks, which are typically outside of IT’s control.

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