M+E Daily

Teradici: Companies to Boost IT Spending by Over 100% to Support Remote Work

Organizations intend to increase IT spending by well over 100 percent to support remote teams, according to the findings of a new Teradici report, “The Separation of Work and Place,” which focuses on lessons learned from companies navigating the “new normal” amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two-thirds of the almost 700 IT respondents indicated they planned to change the way they shift employees to work remotely if faced with a similar event in the future, Teradici said Dec. 9.

IT respondents also shared what they’ve learned since the pandemic amid new concerns ranging from security to managing dispersed teams for an extended period of time.
“Companies across key industries have struggled with the increasing number of IT and remote work hurdles brought on by COVID-19,” according to Ziad Lammam, VP of product at Teradici. “Challenges ranged from procuring new hardware, to VPN set up, to assessing work-from-home policies — all while ensuring security and productivity didn’t take a back seat,” he said in announcing the report’s findings.

“Conversely, we also saw several companies take advantage of centralizing their workstations in a data center or public cloud, providing them many benefits, including greater operational and cost efficiencies, improved flexibility and superior talent acquisition, now from any location,” he noted.
 
The report also showed that companies forced to quickly shift employees to a remote work setting were not fully prepared to make the move. 

Another key finding of the report was that although 65 percent of IT professional respondents expressed being comfortable with the level of security they were operating with after sending their employees home, 35 percent were not comfortable. 

Other Key Report IT Findings
 
• Most Organizations are Leveraging Remote Desktops: A significant 75 percent of respondents said they were using remote desktops in their organizations, although in many cases their remote desktop deployments weren’t company-wide, according to Teradici. One-third of respondents had to procure additional hardware and the same number had to set up a VPN to enable remote access to their corporate networks. 

• Remote Work Will Dominate for the Foreseeable Future: Although the tech (56 percent) and media and entertainment (53 percent) respondents expected more than 50 percent of their workforces to continue working from home, education (43 percent), finance (38 percent), government and military (38 percent) and manufacturing, architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) (36 percent) organizations plan on less than half of their employees to work from home ongoing, according to Teradici.

• Work-from-home Policies Need Attention: More than 50 percent of survey respondents conceded that one of the first issues they had to address was creating or revising their work-from-home policies.
 
IT leader respondents also revealed a significant surge in IT spending to support their remote teams on a long-term basis, according to Teradici. They viewed remote work as the new normal for the foreseeable future and were, as a result, open to shifting budgets and/or prioritizing initiatives that support remote work needs. 
 
Tech organizations and companies within the M&E sector plan on increasing their IT spending over 250 percent, according to the findings.

Close behind was the education industry, which revealed plans to increase spending by 191 percent, outspending other vertical industries including finance (155 percent increase), government/military (139 percent increase), and manufacturing and AEC (118 percent).

Many organizations, meanwhile, are also concerned with improving the user experience, Teradici said. Among respondents, 54 percent said they felt that user experience had been compromised by going remote. IT spending could, therefore, be directed to address this issue moving forward, Teradici noted.
 
Remote Desktops for a Remote Future 
 
Long before COVID-19, many factors were driving the adoption of high-performance virtual workstations. As examples, there had been a growing desire among employees to have flexibility in working remotely, as well as a rise in the freelance workforce allowing organizations to build agile teams and the need to keep data or intellectual property protected in a central location, Teradici said.
 
Survey respondents using remote desktops (75 percent) opted to do so for a few reasons, the most prominent of which was to offer remote access to high-performance workstations needed to run graphics-intensive applications including animation and visual effects applications, according to Teradici.
 
Artists working in M&E, for example, need access to high-performance workstations that are secure and compliant with industry standards, it pointed out. In a remote setting, artists can benefit from solutions that help make more efficient use of the network bandwidth, while saving considerable time and effort for IT teams supporting their remote workers, it said.
 
Top lessons from IT leaders included: There is a need to prepare hardware in advance, it is important to provide client devices, and it is crucial to train employees for remote work, Teradici said.
 
To download the report, visit: https://connect.teradici.com/remote-work-2020.

Teradici surveyed 698 respondents over the course of about four weeks in August about the use and effectiveness of remote desktops within their organizations and their perceptions of remote work at large, it said.

About 96 percent of respondents were IT decision makers, while two-thirds were management level or above. Respondents were distributed across 64 different countries and represented a wide range of organizational sizes, from small businesses to enterprises of over 10,000 employees, it added.