The concept of work is changing. What used to be a place people go is now an increasingly dynamic activity that people expect to be adaptable as they are. People no longer depend on one device in one office building to get their work done. They’re on the go, with their own devices, working when, how, and where they need.

IT is tasked with designing experiences around the ways people want and need to work today. But this doesn’t come without its challenges.

The modern workforce’s appetite for user-friendly, cloud-based services continues to grow. And managing a proliferation of apps scattered across clouds and data centers is unwieldy, increases your security risks, and puts a strain on productivity.

A secure digital workspace is designed to tackle this increasing IT complexity. It brings together everything people need to get work done, including apps, desktops, and files across clouds and data centers, and provides secure access on all networks and devices.

Here are four ways a digital workspace helps you simplify IT management while delivering a better experience for your users.

1. Enable Mobile Workstyles

A secure digital workspace allows employees to work the way they want without risking security. Through their workspace, users can access all their apps, desktops, and data securely from any device, over any network. This takes you out of the business of managing individual devices and instead allows you to manage and monitor everything from a single control plane.

A secure digital perimeter follows users wherever they are. With contextual access policies, IT can manage who’s accessing what and get 360-degree visibility into all user activity.

A digital workspace also includes unified endpoint management, which increases IT productivity and efficiency by automating several aspects of monitoring and management, such as specifying which actions to take in response to various activities or violations. The actions could include remote wiping a device, setting a device to out-of-compliance, revoking a device, or sending a notification to the user to correct an issue within a given time limit.

2. Take Risk Out of Your Users’ Hands

The average employee actively uses 36 cloud services at work according to the Skyhigh Cloud Adoption and Risk Report (including nine collaboration services, six file sharing services, and five content sharing services)And not all are sanctioned by or even known to IT. This is one reason why users are the largest source of data breaches in organizations today.

A secure digital workspace offers secure, easy-to-use file sharing technology that removes the temptation for employees to use their own personal file-sharing services for work. Users can store, share, and sync data across their devices so they can easily collaborate with peers and customers.

And IT remains in control. Using closed-loop analytics to track user behavior, you can automatically implement security protocols, such as blocking access to sensitive files.

3. Easily Access Data Wherever It Lives

You likely have data scattered across hard drives, clouds, network drives, personal cloud connectors, and other solutions like OneDrive or Documentum. Not only is this a management nightmare, but users have to toggle between multiple locations to find and share files. A digital workspace simplifies access to files, creating a seamless sync across apps, devices, cloud providers, company servers, and content management systems already in place.

Additionally, data storage needs and requirements vary across different types of organizations and industries. You may need to host your data on premises for regulatory reasons, or you may want to use just the cloud or even a hybrid approach. With a digital workspace, it doesn’t matter—you can access your data wherever it lives through a single pane of glass.

4. Consolidate Access with Single Sign-On

A digital workspace brings together apps, data, services, and devices across clouds and data centers. This means you no longer have to manage multiple vendors with multiple security protocols—and users don’t have to remember multiple sets of credentials. They simply sign in once and gain access to everything they need.

Your workspace should unify everything.

When managing everything is simple, people get the experience they need. A Citrix secure digital workspace is engineered to increase visibility and simplify management of all apps, desktops, data, and devices, while delivering the unified experience employees need to be productive.

To learn more, visit Citrix.com/workspace.