The COVID-19 crisis has put organizations in a position where 100% of employees need to work remotely from their homes. Popular technologies used for supporting remote employees include Citrix virtual application and desktops, virtual desktop technologies based on VMware Horizon, cloud-hosted desktops (DaaS), or just VPN connectivity. Until now, remote access from home was something a small percentage of employees used.
With all the buzz surrounding user experience these days, I thought it might be worthwhile to start “at 50,000 feet” and dissect user experience into its component parts and see what all the fuss is about. User experience (UX) is somewhat different than customer experience (CX). Customer experience has been defined as the quality of all a consumer’s encounters with a company’s products, services, and brand. Today, user experience typically refers to the digital user experience.
Things are about to get real in so many ways. Companies are telling employees to work from home, which sounds great in theory — less contact, less chance for the COVID-19 virus to spread. But what about the strain it’s going to place on your IT infrastructure? Your employees will be connecting over a remote virtual infrastructure (Citrix, VMware, AWS, etc) and accessing a variety of in-house web applications (Java, .NET etc.) and SaaS services (Office 365).
So your organization has decided to move to the cloud. Smart move! Many companies today are either making the move to the cloud or have already made it. According to RightScale’s 2019 State of the Cloud Survey, 94% of IT professionals say their companies use the cloud. Over 90% is public cloud. Gartner predicts that public cloud revenue will increase by 17% in 2020. The biggest percentage increase is expected with IaaS. So, you’re clearly not alone.
Over 100 million users across 400,000 organizations use Citrix virtual apps and desktops technologies for accessing different types of business applications. There are many software products for monitoring the availability, performance, and usage of Citrix technologies. Of these, Microsoft SCOM is the most popular.
Now how many of you have better monitoring as part of your New Year’s resolution? You want to implement better monitoring into your Citrix environments, right?You want your end-users to experience less technical faults by having a system in place that allows you and the team to be more proactive. OK, probably not what you have been thinking as the clock struck midnight, but it should be part of your professional goals for 2020.
Managing web applications is not a small task and making sure that these web-based business applications are online when that busy workday starts is a challenge for many enterprises. The ability to proactively test the user experience would go a long way for being able to ensure application stability and performance around the clock.
Today’s workforce is rapidly experiencing a cultural revolution. As businesses continue to adopt IT for their core operations and processes, it is more important than ever for IT applications to be reliable and to deliver great performance. Poor application performance results in a loss in business productivity, which in turn has a direct impact on revenues, affects customer satisfaction and tarnishes brand reputation.
I have a coffee mug on my desk that I got from a sales manager many years ago. It’s now filled with pens (I don’t drink coffee), but I take a look at it once in a while. I was starting to think about IT transformation again and noticed a picture of my daughter and an expired AAA card (I might have been thinking AARP) as I looked at that old mug… it reminded me I’m not getting any younger. But it also reminded me of a paradox of culture change.
