A Solid foundation for future growth
Infrastructure has always been the foundation for all the key elements of a successful organisation, from applications and environments, to customer engagement. Without good infrastructure in place, you can’t deliver a good experience to your customers and your organisation won’t be able to function at an optimal level. This presented a major hurdle for many organisations at the start of COVID-19, with a huge strain on infrastructure. However, with all organisations needing to deploy and maintain a secure, effective remote workforce, a change in the way we think about infrastructure was inevitable.
Without sufficient preparation for a remote workforce model, many of our customers experienced an immense strain on their networks, with a huge spike in the demand for bandwidth to support these requirements and a change in bandwidth profile to suit the SaaS-based applications used.
And whilst this certainly needed to be done in a timely manner, compromises in terms of security were common across many sectors as a knee-jerk reaction to the crisis. But while security took a back seat in the rush to get up and running, it is still a vital part of any organisation’s overall resilience.
A key point our Head of Cyber Consultancy makes here is that “patching shouldn’t be forgotten about”. In the mad rush to get workforces online, patching may not have been completed and malware checks not executed, leaving organisations vulnerable to cyberattacks and now having to pick up the pieces.
Catching up to these fundamental changes in the digital landscape takes time. Company policies need to be checked and measures put in place to ensure organisations remain compliant with regulations and legislations, with infrastructure in place if we are to be prepared for something so drastic to happen again. Initially, most businesses thought a remote workforce would only last a matter of weeks, so accepting the potential risks seemed marginal in comparison. However, with the huge shift in staff’s approach to working, should investing in your infrastructure and security be more of a priority?
Given that the resilience of infrastructure has already enabled the corporate world to continue functioning as close to normal as possible, what will a post-COVID way of working look like? Specifically, will a remote or distributed workforce be the new default? A number of companies have already commented on the high levels of productivity and the lack of a requirement for a corporate office, although our Director of Engineering, Chris Christou, has noted that it isn’t quite that easy to just get rid of a physical presence:
The wider picture of digital transformation is shifting; where organisations have been forced into implementing certain infrastructure, the acceleration of Cloud-based solutions has been huge. As a model that is agile and easy to consume, where scaling up and down is fast and effective, moving to the Cloud for many organisations is definitely a priority now if it wasn’t before. From a security perspective too, security professionals and business leaders were initially hesitant to adopt Cloud environments as sight of potential risks was not very clear compared to now, where multiple vendors can provide you with all the eyes necessary to see threats in your Cloud environment. This increased level of visibility makes it much easier to function, manage and work from anywhere.
So, looking to the future, what should you be doing to ensure you stay resilient?
