Although there has been talk for some time now about the remoteization and virtualization of working activities outside the company perimeter, the spread of “agile” work practices has long been limited to a small group of workers who, in some cases, such as sales force, has always found itself operating on the move.
The health emergency linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, with the forced extension of the remote activities of a substantial number of employees, on the one hand, has shown the advantages in terms of maintaining or even increasing, individual productivity from other highlighted significant critical issues in the emergency phase for all those organizational realities in which smart working policies and Digital Workspace and collaboration tools were not already widespread practice.
To add complexity, certainly also the need to extend or update solutions to safely enable remote work in a multi-device context, when the skills and tools available of IT functions can sometimes still be based mainly on technology related to the PC world. , very similar to what was possible 20 years ago.
Even with the gradual return to the office of the workforce with the transition to Phase 2 in the management of the pandemic, enabling remote work – be it flexible and agile according to the principles of smart working, or closer in characteristics to the more traditional teleworking – remains one of the priorities at the top of the list of activities of the ICT division. From the survey conducted by NetConsulting and VMware on a panel of 50 Italian enterprise companies, cybersecurity and Digital Workspace are in fact the main investment areas for 2020 and 2021, with a significant impact obviously given by the Coronavirus emergency.
The two areas are closely interconnected, if we consider the fact that working from home also means the need to extend and strengthen the protection of fixed and mobile endpoints – often also personal devices of one’s employee in the emergency phase – as well as providing a secure connection via VPN and manage access to corporate resources and information.
According to the findings of the Cybersecurity Barometer, NetConsulting cube’s annual observatory on the level of maturity in the IT security field of the main Italian companies, 82% of respondents identified employee behavior as one of the main causes for data loss or theft and information, followed by the growing proliferation of devices and the relative complexity in their management.
Precisely for these reasons it becomes so essential to define a clear line of action to make the Digital Workspace not an emergency solution, but a real focal point of the digitalization strategy of companies, placing security at the center, but without compromising the user experience.
Beyond the emergency: a growing market
If we want to have an idea of the extent of the market linked to the Digital Workspace world in contexts prior to the current emergency situation, the estimates of NetConsulting cube indicate that, at the end of 2019, the market for devices, software components and services that enable the Digital Workspace reached a value of 3.3 billion euros, with a growth of about 15% compared to 2018. The cross-section of expenditure in 2019 sees a prevalence of the application, mobile and cloud component (71%), followed by investments in data transmission devices and services, and by software solutions for identity & access management and endpoint security.
After growth rates substantially aligned in the 2017-2019 two-year period, the forecasts at the end of 2020 instead see growth of more than 20%, with a value in absolute terms that exceeds 4 billion euros. An increase justified by the convergence between initiatives already implemented by companies, and new investments driven by market conditions.
Digital Workspace, 5 pillars for an effective strategy
As we have seen, exogenous contingencies and changing needs of workers indicate that the Digital Workspace paradigm is a constantly growing trend for Italian companies and organizations. So what are the key points to consider when implementing strategies and solutions for remote work? To summarize, there are five key pillars that must distinguish a Digital Worskpace strategy:
Put the employee at the center: it represents the first requirement in defining the requirements in the Digital Workspace. The risk is that if the solutions implemented do not meet the real needs of the workforce, they could end up unused, with additional security risks. It is so crucial for IT to adopt the user’s point of view, in order to define functionalities and usability conditions that will be appreciated by the different categories of employees, different by type of devices used and place where work activities will take place .
Distribute applications anytime, on any device: or at least, distribute all the applications that the employee really needs to work, which can also include older applications or applications with compatibility problems.
Manage devices, with modernity: device management is an additional fundamental requirement to provide consistent user experiences in contexts with an extended perimeter, and corresponds to a unified management of endpoints for greater security, as well as real-time monitoring of devices in use, for better access control to company data.
Pay attention to the user experience and safety:
not only based on what was established “at the table” during the design phase of the experience but also through the use of analysis tools that make it possible to evaluate the status of the devices and safety in real-time, in the most advanced cases also through AI algorithms. As defined by the Zero Trust Security Principles: Never Trust, Always Verify.
Automate where possible, to simplify the work of IT teams:
Gaining visibility and control of all devices and applications inserted in a Digital Workspace context is very complex, and can require considerable effort from the IT function. For this reason, using automation allows you to contain operating costs, through features that can include the onboarding of a new employee, the distribution of applications itself or the release of patches and updates.
To accept the challenge of introducing dynamic and flexible work environments even before the health emergency, we can also cite cases of realities belonging to contexts, such as the public sector, which tend to have more traditional work environments.
The Metropolitan City of Rome has developed the Soft Mobility project, smart working, a review of working life in agile mode, which involved 200 employees for the first phase of the project (expected to grow to 1,200 in the next few years), equipped with virtual workstations The first results of the activities carried out remotely were not long in coming:
the employees involved immediately recorded a better balance between work and private life, also linked to the shorter time spent queuing in morning traffic.
While the University of Florence has revised its IT infrastructure in order to allow teachers and researchers to work more easily from home, as well as to enable online teaching for students. Projects that have never before revealed their importance for business continuity as in recent months.
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