FEATURE
By the time you ’ re reading this , there ’ s a very good chance that you ’ ve not been into the office for nearly 10 months . For nearly a full year , the vast majority of the working world has spent their time operating out of home offices , spare bedrooms and living rooms . Despite this , the work is getting done and , bar sectors where in-person interaction is essential , businesses are still viable .
The path to get to this point , however , has not been smooth . Businesses of all sizes and in all sectors have grappled with the technological infrastructure needed to keep their workers productive . There have been failures , cut corners and complacency to get to today . Truth be told , we ’ re not yet where we need to be to continue making this a long-term viable means of working .
Before we deal with the here and now though , we must first look to 2019 to provide context for the transformational journey businesses have been on that set the stage for this tumultuous year .
How 2019 ’ s tech investments impacted 2020
Unaware of what was to come , there were two key goals for businesses in 2019 in regards to their IT infrastructure . Firstly , they wanted to drive applications to the cloud and reap the cost benefits and competitive advantage that these transformations enable . Secondly , they were looking at how to simplify their IT in general and this was most commonly via investment in SD-WAN projects .
Nathan Howe , Head of Transformation Strategy EMEA at Zscaler
Although companies that went down this route were making sensible decisions at the time and under the circumstances , when lockdowns started being enforced in March , their Business Continuity Planning ( BCP ) was effectively made irrelevant . As lockdowns hit and workers
Not all businesses faced the same challenges , but for those that did , the new task is to balance their performance needs without sacrificing security .
went remote , those sites connected via SD-WAN had no one using them and started gathering dust .
The battleground suddenly switched to one of resourcing and connectivity . ‘ How can I ensure my workers can stay connected and do their jobs ?’ That played out in a few different ways as the year went on .
March – The scarcity phase
Without the infrastructure to support en-masse remote working , scarcity marked the early days of lockdown as businesses scrambled to ensure connectivity and Business Continuity . There was a shortage on two fronts – network connections and devices .
For example , on the connections side , often remote workers had to VPN into the data centre to get access to the Internet . This was a solution built to maybe handle 20 – 30 % of the workforce , so having everyone try to access it at once impacted productivity hugely as the connections were unreliable at best . www . intelligentciso . com
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