Key digital workspace trends for 2025

The world of enterprise IT continues to evolve rapidly and in interesting ways, especially for the digital workspace. This year we saw even more advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), enduring debates over public versus private cloud adoption, and even seismic shifts in hybrid work models — each with a potential to redefine enterprise IT. 

I met with more than 50 IT executives at our Omnissa ONE events, and one thing was clear. Innovation, resiliency, and adaptability are cornerstones of today’s IT strategy.  

For the digital workspace, these themes are deeply connected. IT leaders are working to keep the business agile, give employees seamless experiences, secure the environment, and be cost-efficient — all while future-proofing the organization. In this blog, I highlight five key trends shaping the digital workspace for 2025 and explore their impact on strategic IT goals.  

Trend 1: Endpoint security, employee experience, and endpoint management are converging 

Today, organizations are facing continuous cybersecurity threats, rising employee expectations, and increasing technology heterogeneity. Adopting a holistic strategy across endpoint security, employee experience, and endpoint management can drive measurable business outcomes: 

• Enhanced security with minimal disruption: By unifying security measures with employee workflows, IT can detect and remediate threats seamlessly. For instance, combining endpoint security with device usage data helps IT teams mitigate threats without interrupting critical tasks. A siloed approach, in contrast, might frustrate employees with system slowdowns or intrusive updates. 
• Improved employee productivity and satisfaction: Employees can do their best work when their devices and applications run smoothly. Aligning endpoint management with employee experience tools allows IT teams to proactively address issues like slow devices or outdated software. This improves uptime and reduces helpdesk tickets and costs. Imagine a global retailer resolving virtual point-of-sale (vPOS) client performance issues before they occur, speeding up transactions and improving customer satisfaction during peak shopping seasons. 
• Streamlined endpoint management: A unified approach to endpoint management and security reduces redundancy in tools and processes, lowering operational costs and improving efficiency. For example, if IT and security teams have visibility to shared vulnerability and risk dashboards, they can reach a consensus on a situation and remediate much faster, without wasting time going back and forth. 

By treating endpoint security, employee experience, and endpoint management as interconnected, IT teams can create systems that reinforce each other. This convergence is both a technical and a strategic imperative for thriving in tomorrow’s digital landscape. 

Trend 2: Private clouds are gaining momentum (again) 

My conversations at Omnissa ONE (especially in Europe and Japan) also revealed a renewed interest in private and sovereign clouds. A recent survey by Barclays found that 83% of CIOs surveyed plan to repatriate at least some of their workloads back to private cloud. This doesn’t signal a slowdown in public cloud investments, and we remain bullish on SaaS adoption. Instead, it highlights how both deployment modalities will thrive by catering to different requirements. I see the interest in private cloud being driven by several factors: 

• Enhanced security and compliance: Industries with stringent regulatory requirements — such as healthcare, finance, and government — are favoring private clouds to maintain tighter control over sensitive data and meet specific legal/regulatory standards. 
• Cost efficiency: Private clouds are seen as more predictable and less expensive compared to public cloud services — particularly for certain consistent, sizable, and high-demand workloads.  
• Performance optimization: Private clouds can be tailored for high-performance or low latency applications, offering superior performance compared to generic public cloud setups.  
• Seamless integration: For businesses with substantial on-premises infrastructure, private clouds offer a smooth path to hybrid cloud adoption, maximizing investments and resource utilization.  

There are many examples of industries where some form of a “hybrid” model is in use, such as automobiles (electric vs. gasoline), commerce (digital vs. in store), or education (online vs. classrooms). Our cloud adoption strategy for Omnissa Workspace ONE^® and Horizon^® aligns well with this trend of a hybrid model.  

Trend 3: AI evolves from assistants to agents 

The transition from AI assistants to AI agents (or agentic AI) marks a major evolution in enterprise technology. AI assistants, such as traditional chatbots and rule-based automations, excel at executing predefined tasks. However, they lack autonomy, adaptability, and context. Agentic AI changes this by operating independently, making informed decisions, and adapting to dynamic tasks. 

Agentic AI systems leverage advancements in large language models, multi-modal learning, and reinforcement learning. They act with autonomy and agency, enabling them to perform tasks with minimal human oversight. In enterprise IT, this shift is profound: 

• IT service management (ITSM): AI assistants can handle basic ticketing tasks like password resets or FAQs. AI agents autonomously analyze service logs, predict system outages, and preemptively implement fixes.  
• Cybersecurity: Traditional assistants monitor alerts. Modern AI agents parse through data to assess threats, simulate responses, and deploy countermeasures autonomously.  
• DevOps: AI agents now integrate code, run testing pipelines, and address deployment bottlenecks autonomously.  

Agentic AI unlocks efficiency and strategic value in digital workspace environments. It helps transition from reactive to proactive problem solving, augmenting human expertise with AI in an increasingly automated and data-driven landscape. Our goal with innovations like Omnissa AI is to help organizations fully leverage this groundbreaking technology shift. 

Trend 4: Everything shifts left 

The “shift-left” mindset of early and proactive problem solving is now reshaping IT across development, security, and helpdesk.  

In development, where the concept originated, shifting left emphasizes identifying bugs and vulnerabilities earlier in the lifecycle, reducing costly late-stage fixes. In security, it prioritizes embedding security practices into the earliest stages of design, minimizing risks before they escalate. Now, IT support is following suit, empowering end users with self-service tools and automations to troubleshoot simpler issues by themselves and lighten the load on helpdesk teams. ML and AI further enhance this by enabling self-healing workflows to detect and fix problems without human intervention.  

The benefits of shifting left are profound — addressing issues earlier cuts costs, boosts efficiency, and improves quality of service. It fosters a culture of proactive problem solving as opposed to reactive firefighting. One IT leader I spoke to watches that culture closely as a barometer for tracking shift-left progress. As this mindset gains momentum across disciplines, it is reshaping how enterprises think about speed, agility, and resilience in their IT strategies. 

Trend 5: It’s always the year of the apps

Every year, people ask, “Is this the year of VDI?” While we ponder that rhetoric, the reality is that every year is the “year of the apps.” Apps drive IT! But while mobile and SaaS apps are now a well-oiled machine, the same cannot be said for Windows apps. Still dominant and highly fragmented, they require more IT time and attention. 

Managing the lifecycle of Windows apps is difficult without a universal app format that works across physical PCs, virtual desktops, and published apps. This fragmentation forces enterprises to heavily invest both time and money into app packaging and compatibility testing. Even with such significant investment, keeping apps up to date and secure is an uphill battle. Frequent updates, deployment complexities across hybrid infrastructures, misaligned packaging formats, and incompatible configurations all can strain IT resources and lead to operational downtime, user frustration, and security risks. 

However, with a modern, unified solution, organizations no longer have to juggle disparate tools and workflows to manage application lifecycles. Instead, IT teams can address vulnerabilities and maintain compliance faster, lowering costs and increasing efficiency. 

Conclusion 

These digital workspace trends represent incredible opportunities to accelerate innovation, increase resiliency, and adapt quickly to the next big thing. We’re committed to helping Omnissa customers thrive in this evolving landscape, and together we’ll shape what’s next!