Most businesses these days that rely on software to run their day-to-day operations require an application management strategy. The main goal is to streamline the usage of software so that employees can be more efficient and meet their targets as planned. This usually happens through watchful coordination of the functions offered by these applications with the idea of putting new, more effective strategies into place, which could optimize the workloads further and boost the efficiency of the business to a new level.

A lot of enterprises today still rely on their traditional application management strategies to coordinate their software use despite moving some or all of their workload to the cloud. This was a trend that we saw mostly amongst companies that were forced to transition to cloud-hosted services in a very short space of time to keep their operations up and running as normal. That urgency to migrate to the cloud quickly and smoothly probably shifted the focus from application management and planning new optimization policies. Presently, the landscape of businesses outsourcing cloud services has changed a lot, making more room for strategic designs, that include cloud-hosted software as the major player in these new-generation game plans, laying the roadwork to boost business productivity and success.

What is different about an Application Management Strategy for Cloud Clients?

 

Using managed IT services, like cloud desktop solutions, eases the burden of IT teams entirely with managing updates for large fleets of company PCs according to the latest release week for week. If a company chooses a virtual desktop solution, it moves the whole desktop environment to the cloud, without leaving applications behind to run on endpoint hardware OS. This eliminates a lot of the application management obstacles from those teams, who previously had to deal with a mixture of application suites that did or did not require frequent updates to keep all systems smoothly running and fully secure.

A New Application Management Strategy for New Cloud Clients

 

If you ever took part in application management planning, you surely know that this is a job that needs careful planning and rigorous implementation to make sure you are not running the risk of losing data or affecting the performance of user desktops.

Your Application Portfolio

 

The key thing – if you are looking to move to the cloud and you need a working application management strategy that is usable during and after migration- is understanding your entire application portfolio. It does not make a difference whether you are a small or large business with only a handful of applications or a whole handbook of them on multiple locations. Understanding the entirety of your application estate is the first and most important step to a good and long-lasting application management strategy.

Who uses what?

 

Another important consideration in your planning should be the employees using the software which you are planning to move to the cloud. It might be the case that some applications are not used frequently or at all and they can be scratched out entirely in your cloud migration plan and in the steps following that. It’s a lot easier to optimize workloads by understanding the purpose of different applications by departments and functions. This helps a lot in the later stages when your cloud desktop provider will need to set up the workstations of the end-users without taking time to configure applications that are barely ever used.

A great planning approach takes into account all applications, used by the individual teams, departments, locations, and buildings. This way, moving to the cloud will take less time and your workloads following migration will be better optimized by knowing what works where, and how frequently it operates.

Manage Your Apps As a Cloud Client

 

If you chose to go forward with cloud migration and DaaS, you have already solved your application management problems. A cloud desktop solution deploys all of your software from the cloud and the recurrent maintenance is managed entirely by your provider. The whole virtualization of your software is done by the vendor and application management takes no effort from you at all. It might be the case that you want to keep some applications on-premises, which would take more coordination from you in terms of handling the management for these completely separately from your virtual desktop solution on the cloud. The main take-home message here is that applications that are virtualized and deployed from the cloud require no OS and disk space, as well as recurrent maintenance once you move to the cloud. This makes it incredibly easy for companies to plan and implement new strategies, which should only be concerned about the number of workstations needed, scaling up and down based on demand, and assigning users with applications they need from the cloud.

All in all

 

Application management strategies for cloud clients using virtual desktops require close to no effort after the migration stages. Prior to moving to the cloud, it’s important to consider all of your usable resources so that you will have it easy later on once you transition your entire workload to the virtual machines of your provider. After that, managing applications are taken care of by the cloud desktop vendor, working closely together with their client for assigning applications and optimizing operations on the go.