There’s no slowing down public cloud investment. Gartner® claims that “In 2025, organizations will keep investing in cloud infrastructure and applications, with the market projected to grow by 19.3% in constant U.S. dollars. By 2029, the public cloud services market will reach .42 trillion in current U.S. dollars, driven by AI workloads and enterprise modernization.”
The last several years have seen a dramatic shift in how businesses operate, including remote work becoming a crucial part of the workplace strategy. Whether fully remote or hybrid, most companies employing knowledge workers now offer some form of flexible work. In fact, a recent survey found that 84% of IT professionals report their organizations support remote work in some capacity. This trend continues to fuel demand for SaaS and DaaS solutions, giving workers cloud-first access to productivity apps wherever they are. But this increasing reliance on cloud-based solutions to support remote and hybrid workforces has also intensified the challenges IT teams face in managing security and operational efficiency.
Raising the Bar on Cloud Defense
However, IT leaders are looking beyond a one-size-fits-all approach. While the public cloud plays a central role, many are rebalancing workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments to optimize performance, cost, and governance. In the mid-market, 47% of organizations use a multi-cloud strategy, and 35% favor hybrid cloud, showing that flexibility is essential.
Beyond these core practices, IT teams are exploring emerging tools like remote browser isolation and application containerization. Currently adopted by 42% of organizations, browser isolation provides strong protection by running web sessions in a separate, contained environment. This effectively shields the local network from malicious content.
As organizations modernize their application environments, the focus is less about where workloads live and more about how to deliver them securely, efficiently, and at scale. Public cloud growth is undeniable. But it’s the rise of hybrid and multi-cloud strategies that are helping businesses support legacy applications, enable modern productivity, and integrate AI-driven services.
The Parallels report found that 58% of organizations are planning to change VDI or DaaS vendors, with the majority (94%) planning to implement a new solution in less than a year. Only 28% expect to continue with their current solution and 12% are not sure yet. Rising costs, support concerns, and lack of integration are among the top reasons. The mid-market especially seeks VDI and DaaS options that allow flexible scaling without long-term lock-in.
By now, we’ve grown accustomed to a steady stream of headlines about major cyberattacks hitting companies across every industry. From data breaches at banks and cloud providers to ransomware impacting healthcare and retail operations, the scale and frequency of these incidents continue to climb.
Public Cloud Continues to Accelerate
With major traditional players like Citrix (now part of Cloud Software Group) and Omnissa (spun off from VMware/Broadcom) shifting strategies, VDI is once again under scrutiny. IT leaders are re-evaluating legacy agreements.
By Kamal Srinivasan
SaaS and DaaS Demand Fueling the Shift
The use of application containerization further enhances security and manageability by enabling IT teams to package legacy and modern apps for secure delivery across physical or virtual environments. This approach simplifies version control, supports licensing compliance, and ensures consistent application behavior regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
Reflecting this threat landscape, 42% of organizations experienced a cyber breach in the last year, underscoring the critical need for more robust and proactive cloud defense strategies. The 2025 Parallels State of Cloud Computing report shows growing awareness around securing these increasingly complex environments. While only 37% of respondents ranked cloud vulnerabilities as their top concern, ransomware and malware still topped the list with 88% planning to increase their cybersecurity budgets.
VDI Under the Microscope
As the public cloud grows – accelerated by AI and modern work demands – IT leaders are focusing on how best to secure, operate, and manage their expanding cloud footprints. Many organizations are embracing hybrid and multi-cloud models not because they’re moving away from the public cloud, but because they want more flexibility in how they run legacy workloads, improve cost efficiency, and reduce operational complexity.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) technologies continue to lead public cloud adoption.
Moving Forward with Flexibility and Security
Security is central to that evolution. Protecting both legacy and modern applications—no matter where they reside—requires a balance of usability, performance, and cost. To meet this challenge, IT teams are investing in layered defenses, modern tooling, and cloud-smart architectures to stay ahead of sophisticated threats. As a result, the adoption of the cloud is not cooling. It’s expanding—and so are the tools and strategies needed to manage it well.
Parallels survey data aligns: 85% of respondents say they use SaaS in some capacity, and 33% report using a balanced mix of cloud-delivered and locally installed applications. Businesses are also prioritizing interoperability across SaaS and cloud infrastructure to ensure consistent management and visibility, especially as AI and automation become core to digital workflows.
To keep cloud environments secure, organizations are prioritizing a range of foundational controls, including multi-factor authentication (MFA), encryption policies, and data loss prevention. Many also rely on Zero Trust architecture, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), access controls, and secure file-sharing protocols to protect sensitive data and prevent unauthorized access.
