Opinion

3 EUC inflection points for 2020: WVD, modern management, and yes, BYOD

There are plenty of important topics for 2020, but these will be affected by specific events.

Jack Madden
By
Published: 06 Jan 2020

Now that 2020 is finally, really getting started (I was working last Thursday and Friday, but it sure was quiet), it’s time to take a look at what the new year will hold.

What’s on my mind for 2020? Well... everything! Between desktop virtualization, enterprise mobility, and all the other parts of EUC we cover, there are dozens of threads that I’ll be following.

It would be easy to list out a few EUC topics and call them my 2020 predictions, and if I wrote “I think we’re going to hear a lot more about these this year,” then I’d have a sure chance of getting my ‘predictions’ right. In fact, this is pretty much what I did for my 2019 EUC predictions!

When I look at 2020, of course we’re going to be talking a lot about conditional access and zero trust. More companies will offer device choice and support Macs. Companies will federate more apps and turn on multi-factor authentication. We’ll hear about workspaces, employee experience, workflow apps, and digital assistants. I guarantee it!

But for the rest of my 2020 look ahead article, I want to point out a couple of areas that are reaching specific inflection points this year.

Windows Virtual Desktop

What’s new this year? We’ve been talking about the early developments (RDmi) for a few years, and Windows Virtual Desktop became GA late last year.

The difference is that 2020 will be the first full year of availability. People have had time to preview, plan, and budget for WVD projects, and Microsoft is excited about all the Azure compute hours that they will be able to sell in support of WVD workloads. By the time we get to the end of the year, we’ll be able to see how much adoption it gets.

Windows 10 modern management

Again, we’ve been talking about modern management for a few years now. What’s new?

This time, it’s the impending Windows 7 end of life, coming up on the date we all have seared in our brains, January 14, 2020. A lot of people believe that once companies are past their Windows 7 to 10 migrations, then they’ll be able to concentrate on modern management in a meaningful way. This inflection point will likely stretch out over a few years, but it’s a definite change that’s coming in 2020.

BYOD

We’ve been talking about BYOD for over a decade. Isn’t it solved, and isn’t talking about BYOD passé? 

Sure, it may feel like BYOD is old news, but there are actually a couple of reasons why it will still be big in 2020.

The most specific inflection point is iOS User Enrollment, a brand-new approach for BYOD Apple devices that didn’t exist a year ago. Production deployments should be getting started in 2020, though there also are a few challenges, so we’ll also be watching to see what iOS 14 brings.

On the Android side, Android 10 began the process of deprecating the old device admin management APIs in favor of the modern Android Enterprise management APIs. Android 10 came out in 2019, which means it will be showing up in significant numbers in the enterprise in 2020. Any company that hasn’t gotten started with Android Enterprise—which includes work profiles for BYOD—will have to figure this out in 2020.

Also, remember that BYOD is a moving target because so many of the things that affect it are constantly changing. Consumer preferences, employment models, workforce demographics, laws and regulations, Apple and Google’s level of control, and privacy expectations are always in flux. So, BYOD can never be a “set it and forget it” area.

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