Most enterprises continue to struggle with enabling their entire
workforce to efficiently and safely access corporate back office
systems on a variety of devices and from any location. Indeed,
the advent of mobile, and particularly the BYOD aspects of end
user device selection, exasperated an already over burdened IT
department. And while many organizations eventually
discovered a way to accommodate mobile workers, it was a
painful and often inefficient process.

With the emergence of a new wave of devices in the Internet of
Things that will soon come to market, and an expanded
workforce that requires access to all aspects of corporate back
end support systems, an updated method of delivering
company-wide deployments of needed apps is required. The
move to cloud-centric services is emerging as an important
vehicle for next generation corporate systems, enabling
organizations to move beyond legacy end user architectures.

Workspace as a Service offers a method of enabling workers to
obtain access to whatever app they need, on whatever device,
and with minimal IT overhead. This requires a new way of
looking at corporate end user computing needs, and does
require modifying today’s predominately classical client/server
infrastructure. But it offers the potential to provide a far more
rapid and flexible way of deploying needed line of business solutions in a timely fashion
within a secured data sharing structure. As such it enables an enhanced ability to avoid
corporate data breaches, improves end user management beyond current MDM solutions,
lowers capital expenses in end user and infrastructure equipment, and maximizes overall
Return on Investment (ROI).

To this end, below we look at some of the drivers of this new strategy, discuss the decision
points necessary to evaluate this new way to worker enablement, and analyze the pros and
cons of the Workspace as a Service model.