2025 will be a year the digital workspace takes center stage, according to Karen Gondoly, CEO at the Leostream Corporation. Gondoly is a 20-year IT veteran and she has provided to Digital Journal some key predictions regarding technologies, concepts and trends expected to evolve in 2025.
Gondoly earned her B.S. and M.S. in aeronautical/astronautical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working summers at NASA’s Langley Research Center. She has led product management at Leostream for more than 15 years and has been CEO since 2016.
Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is the new acronym to know
Organizations will recognize the link between employee satisfaction and productivity, and Digital Employee Experience (DEX) encompasses a host of advantages from user-friendly interfaces to personalized workflows that enhance employee engagement.
“Organizations that adopt tools that monitor and improve DEX, such as data analytics to tailor resources to individual user needs, will have happier, more loyal, and more productive workforces, to the great advantage of the business,” says Gondoly.
Digital workspaces become ubiquitous
In 2025 organizations will broadly adopt digital workspaces that provide the distributed workforce with consistent and secure access to resources. These environments will be more flexible and heterogenous than prior iterations offered as single-vendor stacks by industry giants.
A digital workspace is an integrated technology framework that centralizes the management of an enterprise’s applications, data and endpoints, allowing employees to collaborate and work remotely.
“IT teams will realize that crafting a more vendor-independent digital workspace solution allows them to future-proof their infrastructure against unanticipated technology disruptions,” Gondoly predicts. “There are many up-and-coming providers in this space, and they’ll get increased attention.”
The workforce goes fractional
A traditional 9-to-5 work model is increasingly obsolete, especially as more workers are freelancers, contractors, part-timers, and gig economy participants. Businesses in any industry can reap benefits from these fractional workers, who often bring specialized expertise to the team.
“To attract and retain fractional workers intelligently, IT pros need to focus on the tools and resources they need to do their jobs, on policies around the use of those tools and resources, and on monitoring or auditing to ensure those policies are successful,” Gondoly foresees.
Risk management strategies embrace the cloud
The constant specter of cyber threats and the need for data protection will compel more IT pros to situate data and applications in the cloud not solely for availability as in the past, but for improved security, compliance, and disaster recovery capabilities.
“The Change Healthcare data breach disrupted the medical industry in 2023, and the CrowdStrike incident disrupted almost everything,” Gondoly comments. “Cloud-based risk management solutions will be more valued for business continuity and maintaining productivity.”
Weathering industry storms
IT implementations will increasingly be seen as a line of defense against external forces that can disrupt a market segment—another reason digital workspaces will prevail. Beyond cybersecurity needs, there will be efforts to improve business technologies to withstand the impact of climate threats and natural disasters, civil unrest, financial crises, supply chain disruptions, and other factors that can impact an industry.
Gondoly thinks: “Those with modern, flexible, efficient IT environments will have an immense operational edge over those that do not.”
