Entrance of Millennials to Today's Workforce Creating Unique Demand for Cloud Services

Next Generation Communications Blog

Entrance of Millennials to Today's Workforce Creating Unique Demand for Cloud Services


By Beecher Tuttle

Believe it or not, Generation Y is all grown up and hard at work. As was highlighted in a recent artile on the entrance of Millennials into the workforce by Cassidy Shield, head of global solutions marketing for content, cloud, and communications at Alcatel-Lucent, these new employees are bringing about a drastic change in IT departments across the globe. As baby boomers retire and Millennials take their place, chief information officers are being forced to radically alter the manner in which they set up and manage their organizations.

While previous generations have become comfortable with static infrastructures, Millennials – who have grown up with constant connectivity – expect much more. The same teenagers who chose mobile, social and multimedia lifestyles are now ready to bring those habits and expectations into the workforce.

Millennials, who will represent around one-third of the workforce by 2014, believe technology to be an extension of themselves, and, as such, find it to be an indispensable part of their daily lives, whether at home or at work, This evolution has coerced CIOs to consider deploying innovative technologies in the workplace, such as new cloud services that can provide the "always-on" functionality that Millennials demand.

However, the majority of CIOs have reservations about the public cloud, which often accompanies bandwidth scalability and latency concerns, inadequate service level agreements (SLAs) and subpar security, says Shield. In fact, a recent IDC survey found that SLAs and security were two of the biggest factors in executives deciding whether to use a public or a private cloud.

The Alcatel-Lucent Global Youth Lab has been investigating the impact the entrance of the Millennials will have for quite some time.  What they found is that the changing workforce creates an environment that provides a wonderful opportunity for communications service providers (CSPs) to step in and deliver the security, performance and reliability that companies need to leverage the power of virtual desktops, Shield stresses.

CSPs that host business-critical applications in their own carrier-grade cloud can help mitigate many of the concerns that CIOs have with cloud services. Leveraging their distributed footprint, CSPs can optimize cloud performance for high-bandwidth, low-latency desktop applications that are highly reliable and secure.

As a trusted enterprise partner, CSPs can offer clients differentiated SLAs that "look at computing, storage and network resources as interrelated variables," says Shields, adding that new cloud services can also provide significant cost and operational benefits.

"Eliminating in-house support for desktop applications reduces resource and cost requirements…and leasing assets on demand increases operational efficiency and shifts costs to an operating expenditure (OPEX) model," he notes.

Other benefits provided by the virtual desktop model include increased mobility, on-demand access to business-critical resources and the ability to accelerate innovation with ease.

"CSPs have other unique advantages," says Shields, including their existing relationship with enterprises and their first-hand experience with Millennials.

According to Gartner, the total value for cloud services is expected to rise to $148.8 billion by 2014, up from $68.3 billion in 2010. Alcatel believes that CSPs are in the perfect position to meet this demand while offering secure, reliable and differentiated services.



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