Virtual desktop technology has been around for more than a decade, but adoption has lagged due to perceived cost and complexity challenges. With more organizations looking to use the technology to support remote and hybrid workforces, Microsoft is simplifying desktop virtualization with its new cloud-based Windows 365 service.

As organizations continue to shift more and more workloads to the cloud, they may inadvertently create security vulnerabilities. Recent research finds that configuration errors, insecure interfaces, unpatched applications, and poor encryption and authentication practices are opening the door for a variety of exploits.

It’s hard to imagine how businesses could have overcome pandemic-driven operational challenges without the cloud. By some estimates, organizations accelerated their cloud adoption plans by an average of six years in order to ensure remote workers had access to the applications, data and services they needed.

In an age of rapid digitalization, CEOs, CFOs and other members of the C-suite are committed to using technology to increase operational efficiency, improve customer experiences and drive revenues. More than 75 percent of executives surveyed for the Forbes 2021 CxO Growth Survey said they plan to “double down” on technology investments over the next two years.

As part of their digital transformation efforts, organizations of all shapes and sizes are embracing technologies that allow them to analyze massive data sets in order to gain market insights, optimize operations and create personalized customer experiences.

Storage has always been one of the more logical use cases for the cloud — it provides a cost-efficient and easily accessible environment with almost infinite scalability. The benefits have been particularly pronounced during the pandemic, allowing companies to ensure their mobile and remote employees can get the files they need, whenever and wherever they need them.

Agility is a critical competitive advantage that small to midsize businesses (SMBs) have over larger enterprises. SMBs typically can respond rapidly to changing demands and market conditions and fine-tune processes on the fly to enhance the customer experience.

As we discussed in a previous post, there remains widespread confusion about the cloud’s “shared responsibility” security model. Major cloud service providers such as Microsoft and Google have strong measures in place to protect their platforms, but their customers are responsible for securing their data within these cloud environments.

Businesses are aggressively adopting cloud-based productivity suites to improve agility, efficiency and collaboration in a work-from-anywhere world. Two of the more popular platforms, Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s G Suite, have hundreds of millions of users.

Bloomberg analysts report that cloud computing will be the top government IT spending category over the next several years. Most government CIOs say this is a welcome development. In an age of increasing digitization, government agencies are finding it difficult to support their constituents with aging infrastructure.