I’ve written about how the pandemic has forced us all to work remotely and how the short-term fixes have caused long-term challenges. This is the challenge of our time. What I haven’t talked about is where we go from here. There are legacy or traditional ways to manage a remote workforce. However, implementing VPNs, SaaS apps, Cloud, etc. solve specific issues, however, they don’t provide an overall infrastructure to sustain a complete shift of efficiently managing the majority of an organization’s workforce remotely. There has to be a more efficient and capable infrastructure redesign to sustain an organization with 250 to over 100,000 remote workers without breaking the bank and disrupting the entire organization.
Need for operational resilience
In a recent article by Gartner that outlines some of the findings at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2020 Americas, entitled: Gartner Identifies the Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021, Brian Burke, Research VP for Enterprise Architecture and Technology Innovation, was quoted as saying: “The need for operational resiliency across enterprise functions has never been greater, CIOs are striving to adapt to changing conditions to compose the future business. This requires the organizational plasticity to form and reform dynamically.” Burke continued, “As organizations journey from responding to the COVID-19 crisis to driving growth, they must focus on the three main areas that form the themes of this year’s trends:
- people centricity
- location independence
- resilient delivery
Taken together, these trends create a whole that is larger than its individual parts and focus on social and personal demand from anywhere to achieve optimal delivery.”
How to achieve optimal delivery?
Although this sums up the current climate perfectly, achieving the concept without a capable technology overhaul, is much easier said than done. The question is, how does an established organization who has accumulated a myriad of technologies over many years possibly make such a shift when rigidity and complexity are the norms.
The challenge is immense largely due to the multitude of technologies and systems installed in the typical enterprise environment. For example, Forester Research has estimated that 60% of organizations are still running server 2008, 52% are still on WindowsXP, and 43% still have applications running in Windows 7. In environments with all of those legacy technologies, running applications, trying to achieve the type of flexibility and plasticity required to enable secure unfettered access to every application seems near impossible. Although what seems near impossible to IT, the users consider it necessary and they’re demanding these types of flexible and convenient capabilities. The users want 100% accessibility of every application, no matter what platform or infrastructure they’re running on. They want to access their applications from any device without disruption no matter where they are on the planet. These are huge demands for what seems like a daunting task for IT.
The concept of Anywhere Operations
In the article, Gartner presents the concept of Anywhere Operations. They outline how anywhere operations refers to an IT operating model designed to support customers everywhere, enable employees everywhere, and manage the deployment of business services across distributed infrastructures. It is more than simply working from home or interacting with customers virtually – it also delivers unique value-add experiences across five core areas:
- collaboration and productivity
- secure remote access
- cloud, and edge infrastructure
- quantification of the digital experience
- automation to support remote operations
Then they conclude the concept with this… “By the end of 2023, 40% of organizations will have applied anywhere operations to deliver optimized and blended virtual and physical customer and employee experiences.” Obviously, since the team at Gartner named Liquit a Cool Vendor in 2018, they’ve been keeping an eye on the progress that we’ve made. They’ve realized that the concept of Anywhere Operations is easily achieved through the Liquit platform that makes achieving these goals rapidly a reality.
Anywhere Operations achievable today
Liquit was designed for such a time as this. Providing every user unfettered secure access with single sign-on capabilities to every application running on every platform and accessible from every device. Liquit also reduces the management and support burden on IT by providing a comprehensive administration console that automates the tedious tasks that once took so much time and effort away from IT’s primary role of enabling the innovation required to help the organization grow. Liquit’s admin capabilities allow applications to be decoupled from the back-end, which provides uninterrupted access to applications and eliminates downtime completely. Liquit drives down the cost of managing a complex IT infrastructure by providing all of the capabilities to deliver and access all applications.
Gartner couldn’t have expressed the problem that Liquit solves any better. Anywhere Operations is no longer just a concept, it is a reality with Liquit. Our platform is easier to implement and more cost-effective, and it doesn’t require an infrastructure overhaul because it leverages the existing IT infrastructure and allows an organization to immediately meet the needs of their end-users. Liquit also offers IT a simpler way to migrate on their timeline and to the most cost-effective platform of their choice both now and in the future. Liquit can replace the multitude of legacy management tools used by IT today. However, due to its open architecture and flexibility, Liquit can work side by side to fill the gaps where these types of tools fall short as well. Liquit also allows a gradual migration away from these types of expensive legacy technologies if that’s what IT chooses to do.
Liquit is the Anywhere Operations management platform that provides extensive flexibility to future-proof your infrastructure. No longer will an organization be fearful of incorporating new technology; with Liquit, there is no disruption to the users and implementing any new technology is a breeze. So as Gartner looks to the future of IT, Liquit is already there making Anywhere Operations a reality that is easily achievable today.