On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of millions of motorsport fans from around the world will be tuning in to watch the Australian Grand Prix. And while the cars offer a fascinating insight into the future of motoring - many innovations start in F1 and eventually find their way to consumers - the technology behind the cars is incredible.

After a day touring garages and chatting with people behind the scenes, I discovered there's a lot we can learn about managing enterprise and business systems from this massive rolling roadshow.

Citrix has launched a locally-hosted instance of their Cloud Management Control Plane. This will give companies in Australia and New Zealand local access to a suite of Citrix cloud services. This means they won't need to be "beholden to a management plane that sits in the Americas or European Union" according to Les Williamson, the area vice president for Citrix in Australia and New Zealand. This will offer better performance though lower latency and assurance that entire cloud operations can be fully managed onshore he said.

​

Desktop as a Service poses an existential threat to traditional VDI providers so it's not surprising Citrix is getting on board with leveraging cloud services as the delivery vehicle for their software. XenDesktop Essentials is a subscription service that allows companies to deliver and manage Windows 10 Enterprise without the need to deploy a bunch of on-prem infrastructure.

Bring your own device might be an unstoppable trend in the workplace, but accepting that still requires IT pros to work out a strategy for dealing with making those devices actually useful for something more than email and occasional browsing. Two distinct schools of thought have emerged here: desktop virtualisation and deploying native apps. Which is the better solution?

A common workplace reaction to the bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon is an outright ban. But take heart: it might not be forever.

Based on our recent survey of Lifehacker users, phones are rapidly overtaking laptops and notebooks as the BYO device of choice. Plus: who won the tablets we were giving away?