The pandemic and its accompanying disruptions changed forever how enterprises think about, acquire, and use technology resources in order to meet constantly changing demands. One of these demands, the ability to work in collaborative teams anywhere in the world, dramatically accelerated in the 2020–2021 timeframe.

Over the 2020–2021, some research indicating that as many as 40% of endpoints in a given enterprise could access desktop and application virtualization as part of an overarching hybrid work strategy. This expanded access is likely to continue for the immediate future but will likely taper off as hybrid work models begin to stabilize.

Virtualization of applications and desktops is a key enabler of this hybrid work approach, providing a fully encapsulated remote access system which can be secured, monitored, and optimized to perform across a wide range of geographies, network infrastructures, and end-user requirements. When unchained from traditional datacenters and deployed and procured at least partially via the public cloud, desktop as a service (DaaS) can optimally address the workloads and geographies where they are needed most, making this technology even more valuable.