What does the Future Hold for Businesses
So much has changed during the COVID-19 outbreak where working remotely has ended up, you can say, the only option to learn, work and relax for both individuals and organisations. Organisations who had already invested in cloud technologies had an early lead advantage to getting their employees to become a remote workforce and to work on their teleworking adoption mentality. Also, those organisations that had not previously invested quickly found a budget to immediately migrate to the cloud.
What does this mean? Cloud technology abruptly positioned itself as the ‘go-to’ business continuity solution for all types of organisations, big or small. The question now is, will the affected industries and sectors remain with this concept of remote working or will they go back to old habits.
Cloud
Technology pushing us through COVID-19
Manage and Diversifying Risk
The concept of cloud technology,
for those who adopt and implement it, is to eliminates the dependency of
physical data centres which host servers, switches, firewalls, etc… in order to
all the proper management and upkeep of infrastructure, data, and applications
in real-time, wherever you are located. This in turn has the direct benefit of
not requiring IT administrators to be on-site to check, maintain and monitor
networks and servers. This helps comply with governments requests to keep
people safe and adhere to social distancing whilst allows for businesses to
operate to continue to operate without the need of having their staff within
the office.
Enabling Remote Work
If there was one good thing to
come out of this pandemic is that the adoption of remote working was
exponentially accelerated which allowed organisation who had been contemplating
about moving the cloud but where unsure, to actually do it. They may now
evaluate and compare their business efficiency and operations, before and after
COVID, to take the decision on how to move forward with the remote workforce
initiative from here on.
What does the
Future Hold?
Tried and Tested
Cloud-enabled companies now have the
practical experience of how a global disaster can affect their business and are
now better prepared and equipped to weather any future interruptions and
recover from them. With that said, apart from recover point, cloud-enabled
organisation are now even better positioned to recover faster giving them a
competitive advantage.
Digital Transformation…Now
The global widespread adoption of cloud technologies due to COVID-19 for remote work has opened a world of opportunity for them to properly investigate and invest in digital transformation technologies. This means that each and every business now has the opportunity to position themselves as the other world-leading organisations who use cloud technology to gain a business edge.
The new Norm of Remote Working
Organisations are now intending
to shift some or most of their on-site employees to become remote workers passed
COVID-19. The amount of money which may be saved by enterprises on rent of
office space for both their staff and data centres, as well as time spent for
their employees to commute is not something to be ignored.
Proof that you need to put in
place new types of Business Continuity Plans
Now, more than ever, companies who
either didn’t have a business continuity plan (BCP) or had gaps in there BCP have
had a cold slap of reality and have taken the initiative of creating and
updating their BCP.
The traditional thinking that a
BCP is only in place to perform backups is something that has been recently
realised. Backups are used to perform a one-time fix to a disaster, however,
COVID19 proved that disasters may sometime take longer than a couple of days
but will last months, if not years. Therefore, backups alone will not cut is
and thus why organisations are looking into cloud technologies to implement a
proper and robust BCP.
Business continuity plans of the
future will include a cloud-based remote access
infrastructure that can be scaled up on the fly to support an entire
workforce when needed. They should have relationships managed services partners
that can help businesses handle increased IT operational workload so they can
stay focused on their immediate business needs.
We are Here
to Help
If you need help getting your
business into the cloud quickly, enabling remote work, mitigating the risks of
offshore outsourcing or reinforcing your business continuity plan with the
agility of Azure and Office 365 technologies — our team is here to help. Get in touch to schedule a call today.