Embracing the Cloud
The overall success of organisations’ response to COVID-19 has emphasised the importance of agility, flexibility and resilience, but there is still work to be done. Even as we anticipate an end to social distancing and lockdown, there is already widespread speculation about how organisations could potentially handle a second wave of COVID-19, or a similar event. Going forward, to ensure organisations are properly equipped to handle the unexpected, we must therefore shift from treating this as an isolated event to an ongoing, constantly evolving process. This new landscape provides fresh opportunities for improvement, which we should be identifying and acting upon, while maximum operational efficiency is becoming inherent in the design of both infrastructure and processes.
In light of all this, most organisational policies within a business will most certainly need to evolve, from security to recruitment and remote working. This will ensure all the lessons learned from COVID-19 result in positive, sustainable change across every area of an organisation’s day-to-day operations. IT partners should play a crucial role in this process, providing hands-on advice regarding current best practice and potential scalability.
Cloud has been on the rise for many years now, but the move to a remote workforce has meant more and more organisations, who may have initially been reluctant to fully embrace it, have now experienced its benefits first-hand. As with the cultural and infrastructural shifts, the transition from traditional ways of working to a more efficient approach is now on the rise, but this is still very much the beginning of some organisations’ journeys. As we have touched on throughout this report, we are now seeing Cloud specialists becoming trusted partners, delivering a wide range of managed and consultative services which can be tailored to a range of requirements, rather than catalogues of products with a one-size-fits-all approach.
However, despite the growing level of confidence in Cloud, security still remains a major point of concern for many sectors, especially those that handle financial or healthcare data. This goes for both daily communications and the management, storage and archiving of company data. In other words, to prove viable in the long term, any physical or virtual storage solutions must not only meet all compliance requirements, but also offer the kind of scalability needed to manage the ever-increasing volumes of data organisations work with. We spoke earlier about GPs utilising UC solutions to stay connected with colleagues and patients whilst working remotely; these are Cloud-based solutions with easy accessibility, enabling staff to access key data wherever and whenever they need it. What’s more, these solutions have security measures in place which provide high levels of data protection, meaning all sectors can take advantage of the technology. Once again, however, the choice of provider is key here – any IT specialist you consider partnering with should possess deep expertise regarding industry-specific compliance requirements.
In terms of both security and efficiency, advanced monitoring is also key. This provides a powerful argument for a managed service, where a partner’s dedicated support team takes a proactive approach to monitoring infrastructure, responding instantly to any potential security threats. This type of support helps maximise the effectiveness of internal IT teams, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of the provider’s own network, security systems and specialist expertise, while focusing their own energies on their organisation’s business growth goals.
In terms of the hardware offered to all team members, we anticipate a lot of streamlining.
Consider the phones many team members still have on their desks – most of which will have been sitting unused since lockdown commenced – Cloud-based UC solutions are an obvious first step to streamlining your communications. With continual updates and ongoing developments available, security and compliance risks surrounding sensitive data are minimised. With the likes of endpoint protection and identity management to further strengthen security surrounding these solutions, it will be unnecessary to invest in physical communication tools. Combine this technology with the right VPN and staff are free to make their calls from anywhere, with the same high standard of securityand compliance.
This extends to the legacy systems that many organisations still depend on, particularly storage. This might be due to their teams’ familiarity with these systems, or the potential cost of modernising, but it is clear at this stage that such cumbersome systems do not provide the level of flexibility and efficiency that organisations will require going forward. Cloud-based storage will largely eliminate the need for on-premise archiving, although we would anticipate the full-scale deployment of such solutions to be phased out gradually for most organisations, rather than full-scale ‘lift and shift’ operations. For instance, some data could be migrated to the Cloud, while some remains on-premise, hosted in the organisation’s own servers, either on a temporary or permanent basis, with on- and off-premise elements of the infrastructure securely connected. Furthermore, from a cost perspective, moving to an OPEX model with Cloud services billed based on consumption is an easy transition if you do not have to make a huge overnight shift from legacy hardware.
With a robust, secure network as the foundation, such Hybrid Clouds - where Public and Private Cloud solutions are integrated with physical ones in tailored combinations - are not just an intelligent response to events like COVID-19, but a launchpad for future growth, offering the security and scalability needed to accommodate both long-term business goals and agile responses to immediate crises.
