Strategies

COVID-19 – What happens next?

The world of IT has been put through its paces over the last couple of months, ensuring that business, as usual, is possible for digitally enabled organisations. Clouds have become full, VPN gateways have run out of session and virtual desktops have been spun up like never before.

Now we have most working, the time has come to create a digital strategy to provide these capabilities as the norm. Let’s face it organisations have been pushed to enable ‘working from home’ and it’s been demonstrated its most certainly possible. In fact for a large number its improved productivity, removed the need to commute, and reduced the amount of travel required. Meetings are happening online and businesses are embracing the technology. Through these tough and unprecedented times, the one silver-lining that has come out of COVID-19 is that it has pushed many organisations to embrace IT, and begin to understand the benefits a correctly strategised and budgeted IT department can bring to the business.

Here are the top 5 areas Next2IT believes organisations should be reviewing and improving.

1 – Security

It should come as no shock that rapid deployment of infrastructure has resulted in ‘short-cuts’ reducing an organisation’s security. It’s time to review what’s been deployed and how it can be hardened to keep an organisation secure. Some of the top areas to be reviewed include multi-factor authentication, public-facing services, end-user devices, and shadow IT.

2 – Bring your own device capabilities

One of the problems companies faced after enabling remote working solutions was providing users with devices. A sudden rush for laptops resulted in big-name providers running out of stock! A bring your own device solutions enables users to utilise their own tech to connect and work (You will find most prefer this too!)

3 – Zero trust access

Zero trust security means that no one is trusted by default from inside or outside the network, and verification is required from everyone trying to gain access to resources on the network. This added layer of security has been shown to prevent data breaches. Cloudflare, Zscaler, and Cisco all have really interesting solutions for this.

4 – Cloud technologies

Big problems occurred in this space and they could have been easily avoided. All the top providers recorded record high usage and as a result capacity issues. Many organisations had not made use of vendors multiple data centres and ran into serious issues, including large numbers of services not being available. Any Cloud strategy should include multiple data centre deployments, disaster recovery and really you should be looking for a multi-cloud platform.

5 – Unified Communication

Microsoft Teams, Google Hang-Outs, and Zoom all had big plays here. But a number of organisations have taken advantage of 6 months of free licensing. You should be devising a plan to keep these features activated after the lockdown finishes, it’s important to plan and budget for them now!

Next2IT can help you with your IT strategy moving forward. Get in contact to find out how we can get you enabled for the future.