TALKING
business
‘‘
COVID-19 has undoubtedly acted
as a monumental turning point for
organisations globally. Pressured to
respond at speed to government-imposed
lockdowns, businesses rushed to deploy
remote working models in a bid to maintain
customer-facing services while keeping
employees safe. And as UK lockdown
restrictions begin to ease, companies are
using the advantage of hindsight to take
lessons from the challenge of initiating digital
options for remote workers at scale to reassess
their current work from home policies.
The priorities for the future are clear for many.
In an uncertain world where health crises
and other disruptive events will affect and
shape how we work, a revamp of IT systems
to ensure the distributed workforce can
work securely and effectively – while critical
enterprise systems remain both protected and
highly available – is invaluable.
Meeting cybersecurity challenges
There has been a rapid uptick in ransomware
attacks among businesses, governments,
research establishments, healthcare agencies
and schools, as cybercriminals were quick
to take advantage of the recent pandemic.
According to Reuters, ransomware attacks
jumped by 148% in March as online threat
actors targeted vulnerable remote users.
Utilising traditional VPN connections to
enable remote workers opened up enterprise
networks to cyberattacks that entered
through employee home networks, which
many organisations discovered to their
detriment. To eliminate this risk, IT leaders
will need to deploy active protection tools
across the entire extended network and
initiate advanced built-in backup, Disaster
Recovery and cloud storage to enable fast
and granular object-level recovery in the
event of an attack. However, cybersecurity
issues were not the only challenge that
confronted IT managers tasked with
deploying remote working models at speed.
Enabling work from home fast
For a large majority of businesses, it was
a challenge to equip their home workers
with the right kit to work remotely. With
devices suddenly in short supply on the open
market, they were faced with having to ask
employees to use their own personal devices.
“
UTILISING
TRADITIONAL VPN
CONNECTIONS TO
ENABLE REMOTE
WORKERS
OPENED UP
ENTERPRISE
NETWORKS TO
CYBERATTACKS
THAT ENTERED
THROUGH
EMPLOYEE HOME
NETWORKS,
WHICH MANY
ORGANISATIONS
DISCOVERED
TO THEIR
DETRIMENT.
This meant that enterprise infrastructures
had to be configured at speed to enable
VPN access for users – a mammoth task
for already overstretched IT teams and
a complex approach that required near
constant support for users as they struggled
to connect with enterprise systems.
That said, organisations that had previously
deployed a virtual desktop infrastructure
(VDI) solution were able to quickly initiate
virtual workspaces at scale – serving these
up to workers anywhere and on any device.
This made it possible to extend the remote
capabilities of the workforce in a predictable
and easy to manage way, without
compromising enterprise security.
VDI has become a highly practical
option due to the recent emergence of
Edge Computing in combination with
hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). For
www.intelligentcio.com
INTELLIGENTCIO
39