This is a guest blog post by Archana Venkatraman, Associate Research Director, Cloud Data Management, IDC Europe.

2020 was a defining year for remote working. As a result of extraordinary social measures taken globally to contain and manage the spread of COVID-19, organizations were forced to urgently enable remote working and productivity throughout the crisis recovery journey. Companies have had to redefine how IT services are delivered.

That’s why, despite a general slowdown in ICT investment, IDC’s survey revealed spending resilience in areas such as cloud solutions, secure remote access, digital workspaces, data security, and videoconferencing.

Digitally determined companies and IT admins see the current situation as an opportunity to further streamline and optimize how they manage desktop and app delivery. They are evaluating how they can harness the power of cloud services to simplify the management of their existing deployments and minimize management overheads, reduce administrative burdens, and create a more agile, secure IT environment.

As an IT and digital champion, if you are under pressure to provide immediate business value, migrating to cloud-based desktop and application service delivery can bring significant benefits. These include:

Faster Time to Value and Agility

Cloud-based IT service delivery alleviates time-consuming software installations, upfront configurations, ongoing maintenance, and eventual upgrades.

IT teams don’t need to spend time procuring, installing, and maintaining hardware — conserving time and budgets for strategic priorities. Delivering services faster from any cloud empowers the hybrid-cloud strategy and improves user experience around onboarding, training, and business-critical use cases.

Deployment Flexibility

Successful cloud migration strategies are those that happen at your own pace and on your own terms.

Security risk mitigation, privacy concerns, local data sovereignty laws, and industry compliance regulations are among the top concerns slowing down public cloud adoption. With cloud-based IT service management, it doesn’t matter where the application and data resources live — on premises, public cloud, or a hybrid cloud. There is a separation between the management plane and the data plane. This means IT admins can securely monitor and manage apps and data deployed in one or more locations or clouds from a single cloud-based management without worrying about data sovereignty issues.

Adopting cloud-based IT service delivery can help support ongoing remote working, business continuity expansion, and cost efficiency. This helps deliver business value while modernizing IT delivery to meet the needs of a digital business.

Simplified Management, Security, and Business Continuity

Integrated cloud services simplify the management of IT resources.

Many business continuity plans weren’t ready to cope with unprecedented crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Those organizations that had adopted cloud-based IT service delivery were better prepared to manage and monitor their IT services. Existing desktop images and application packages could be quickly deployed to new users, and bursting to the cloud was seamless. Maintenance and monitoring of these hybrid sites happen from a single console, with advanced security and performance analytics to monitor user activity and session responsiveness.

Sustainability and Broader Business Objectives

Moving from running software on your own premises to a cloud service also helps to achieve sustainability goals.

Cloud services run on efficient infrastructure with higher utilization rates, which helps reduce energy consumption and your carbon footprint. By moving to a cloud service, you can reduce your own datacenter footprint and energy consumption to run the software.

An additional benefit is that you don’t need to report carbon emissions for the cloud service, as it is counted as a Scope 3 indirect emissions, and organizations only need to report on Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. By migrating to a cloud-service model, companies can reduce their carbon footprint and get closer to meeting their carbon emission reduction goals.

There is no doubt that as we enter a new reality, the competitive advantage will go to organizations that can empower their employees with the culture, flexible workplace, and digital tools to do their best work wherever, whenever, and however work needs to get done. Having a cloud strategy is an excellent way for IT teams to digitize their service delivery and management.

To learn more, hear from analysts and industry experts in this on-demand webinar on the role of cloud in the digital economy.