It
has been a little over one year since COVID-19 was classified as a pandemic and
shut down most of the country. Throughout the past 12 months, COVID-19
showcased IT's ability to step up to not only fight the virus but also drive
innovation to keep businesses up and running while protecting them from
cyber-adversaries.
Innovations
in communications technology has ensured that nearly 60%
of people working from home due to
COVID-19 are content. In particular, Zoom saw its users jump 30-fold in April
2020 as businesses quickly learned how to manage remote workforces. The pandemic has also changed attitudes to technology
forever with more
than half of executives investing in technology for a competitive advantage or
refocusing their entire business around digital technology.
Remote
work has also forced security teams to work together to combat growing
cyberthreats. Throughout the pandemic, there has been a 300% jump in
cybersecurity complaints according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint
Center. Forbes
also reported in 2020 that even as the pandemic caused many companies to reduce
IT spend overall, investment in cybersecurity increased during the year
compared with 2019.
As
we reflect on one year since remote work began, we spoke to various experts on
what the IT industry learned from a year of lockdowns and the role technology
will play as organizations begin to plan for a return to a new semblance of
normalcy.
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Jay Ryerse, CISSP, VP of Cybersecurity Initiatives, ConnectWise
"In
a typical year, the rate of technology adoption among businesses is fairly
pedestrian. Many organizations may pick up only one or two new pieces of
technology as the need arises. If a sales department needs new billing
software, budgets are checked and funds are reallocated to make it happen. There
is change, but not without a lot of forethought, and it usually doesn't happen
very quickly.
As
we all know, 2020 was a different ballgame. Though it probably seems like much
longer to most people, it's been about a year since the pandemic spurred a massive
global transition to work-from-home. And in that single year, companies adopted
technology at a rate we would typically see over an entire decade. The
reason? Changes occured not because we wanted them to, but because we had no
other choice.
The
obvious example is technology that allows for greater connectivity,
communication and collaboration -- things like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack
are far more common today than they were a year ago. But cybersecurity
technology also saw rapid growth. As people scrambled to get a home office
together, employers rushed to get them the tools they needed to work and stay
productive -- and in many cases, security took a backseat to productivity. That
changed once employees became more settled, and companies began rapidly
implementing technologies like virtual private networks, endpoint detection and
response, security information and event management, and two-factor
authentication. Getting everyone smarter about these technologies was also
important, so cybersecurity education and training became more popular than
ever too.
A
year ago, it would have been hard to imagine having every meeting online and
every event be virtual. While some things will return to normal, the work
environment has likely changed forever. It will be interesting to see if
technology adoption will continue at a fast rate, and how companies will deal
with new challenges, like providing IT support remotely, handling HR issues or
what to do with office space. But in the end, people are resilient, and society
has shown it is willing to make these changes and continue moving forward."
--
Nicole Sahin, CEO, Globalization
Partners
"The
advent of global remote work was born out of crisis, but society has found
unexpected silver linings even as we begin to pull out of our collective grief.
Global remote work is here to stay, and with it, the stronger family ties,
greater diversity in the workforce, and the democratization of opportunity.
Companies have realized that they can hire great talent anywhere in the world,
and opportunity is no longer limited to a 50 mile radius of where people live.
The doors of opportunity have flung open to everyone, everywhere, and with it
comes our ability to harness the great minds that can be found in every corner
of the earth."
--
Bob Davis, CMO, Plutora
"For
organizations like restaurants, airlines and travel companies that rely on
customers being out and about, the past year was a tremendous struggle through
no fault of their own. It's been heartbreaking to see so many companies forced
to permanently shut their doors because of these hardships. However, many
companies in different industries were able to weather the storm by quickly
adapting to the new way of working. For enterprise companies, this meant
ensuring they were still able to deliver high quality, efficient software that
delights customers and delivers value to the business-all while teams were
physically separated.
This
kind of success could only be accomplished with complete portfolio and pipeline
visibility, smooth handoffs between teams, governance and compliance, and a
system that facilitates collaboration-or in other words, the guiding principles
of value stream management (VSM). Since last March, VSM platforms helped many
companies overcome the challenges of our new remote world by providing the
necessary foundation and visibility to keep projects moving forward.
As
our world inches back to some semblance of our pre-pandemic days or whatever our
new normal will be, many changes that were established to keep business moving,
such as remote and flexible working, will stay in place. Whichever way
companies decide to continue operations-whether it's requiring all employees to
be in the office again or allowing them to work remotely-VSM will ensure that
teams are completely connected and still able to deliver the best software
possible."
--
Richard
Cassidy, senior director, security strategy, Exabeam
"The
rapid shift in workplace practices over the past year has been a steep learning
curve for most security organizations. With most working from home for the
first time, meeting and collaborating online in a cloud-based environment has
been a drastic change.
As we
begin to move through the pandemic and the most severe restrictions are lifted,
organizations should prioritize reinvesting in their security teams. For most
businesses, there's been a stark shift in working practices and the world has
accelerated its shift to a more distributed operating model. All things
considered, we need a far greater focus on security and the already limited
supply of security professionals tasked with ensuring this, will need our full
support. Now more than ever, it's critical that we ensure we operate with the
right tools and approach, maximizing our employees productivity,
promoting the well being of our workforce and ensuring better collaboration
between business stakeholders.
We have
struggled to survive and operate in the age of alert overload for far too long
now. Our security, risk, compliance and response teams are overwhelmed by the
data points they need to manage to avert outages or audit failures! As a year
has passed, and we slowly move into a plan for a new approach to business
dynamics and operations, we need to consider how we can better support our
security teams and automate as much of the more "time intensive" and mundane
tasks, as possible. As business leaders, we have to better support our security
professionals in protecting our organizations and enable our rising stars to
accelerate their enablement and learning to more effectively support their
teams. We also need to rethink security operations center (SOC) practices and
look at what is needed to foster the outcomes that are aligned to our new
business operating model and cybersecurity needs.
Unsurprisingly,
the attack surface is far greater now, and IoT security is a bigger risk vector
than ever before, making it important that organizations cast their net of
inspection far wider now. The home office is the new corporate cubicle for
many, but the majority of companies are considering a hybrid in-office and
remote work model. Security teams now need to detect anomalies from corporate
networks and home networks, users and devices -sources at a rate almost never
seen before- given that the home-office can be far easier to compromise due to
the inherent lack of corporate security capabilities.
The key
to transforming business security operations and outcomes is the foundation of
behavioral analytics and the automation of incident detection, triage and
response. Done correctly, such an approach will undoubtedly free up security
teams time enormously, and enable your existing datasets to be better
leveraged in the detection of anomalies across the entire estate, not least
transform how you monitor critical assets (user accounts & devices) to find
early signs of suspicious or potential breach activity.
When
presented with the most critical information and with all of the necessary
context, security teams can better respond, mitigate and remediate the many
threats they are faced with. Furthermore, to ensure flexibility that will work
both in the office and remotely, companies should help their security teams
transition their security controls to the cloud.
Continuing
to apply legacy approaches in this evolved ‘digital business' era is
almost a nonsensical approach to take. We only need to look at breach statistics
this past year alone to understand the fact that it wasn't working before.
Organizations should look at this period of great change as a catalyst for
innovating, evolving and enhancing their approach to security, not least how to
better serve the needs of the business in terms of operational transformation."
--
Ali Knapp, president, Wisetail
"Nearly
one year after the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the U.S., leading to
lockdowns and entire companies abandoning their offices for safer but more
isolated remote work approaches, it's critical for organizations to not only
review their business strategies but also their people strategies. With
nearly one-third
of workers claiming they'd rather take a pay cut than return to an office
and more than half believing all companies should offer a remote work option,
keeping staff engaged and excited from afar is a need that's here to stay.
Research
shows that social and collaborative interactions are key to corporate
prosperity. Employees perform better when they work collectively, customer
retention is higher with training and engagement programs, and partners and
sales teams are more successful when they have ongoing learning experiences.
While
the bottom line is important, ensuring staff feel valued and passionate about
their work can help turn a company into a true community. On the one year
anniversary of this new remote world, we are highlighting key steps businesses
must work into their people strategies to help bring distributed staff closer
together, despite being far apart:
- Provide a
personalized and social learning experience: Whether a company is
onboarding new joiners or providing training for existing employees, making
these engagements targeted to their roles, interactive and engaging can reduce
feelings of loneliness and help individuals retain information.
- Communication and social
gamification: Turning learning opportunities into games that help staff
collect points for attendance, leading to praise and prizes, can foster wider
training buy-in from employees.
- Culture of community: Encourage
staff to communicate on internal message boards and even chat apps about their
work experiences and what's going on in their personal lives -- try out
an amazing new recipe? Share it! Run a 5K? Share it! Finally teach your new
pandemic puppy how to sit and heel? Share it! Including one another in the
little wins in life can create a community within a company and help
individuals feel like they are in this together, regardless of location.
In
short, the right people strategy leads to a strong culture and a greater brand,
while making each individual feel heard and appreciated."
--
Art
Gilliland, CEO, Centrify
"After
a year of remote working, enterprises have learned that the cloud is no longer
just a ‘nice to have,' but a requirement of the new reality. Even as we begin
to see a light at the end of the tunnel with the vaccine rollout, cloud has
emerged as a game changer in terms of availability and scalability as well as
flexibility and reliability, making it a must-have moving forward.
Companies
who want to continue to drive their cloud initiatives forward must apply the
same security controls and operational disciplines across both on-premises,
hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. A recent Centrify survey revealed that
65% of respondents experienced attacks on their cloud environments in the last
12 months, with cyber-attackers achieving an 80% success rate.
Our
research also showed that 90% of cyberattacks on cloud environments this past
year involved compromised credentials. To address cloud-based threats, the IT
stack should be secured by a centralized privileged access management (PAM)
solution architected in the cloud, for the cloud. Centralized identities and
privilege elevation strategies empower granular access controls to hybrid
environments, even as digital transformation accelerates and workforces evolve
post-COVID-19. With multi-cloud strategies becoming the norm, the ideal
security approach relies on zero trust principles for strong authentication,
employs least privilege to restrict lateral movement, and leverages key
benefits of the cloud economy in order to minimize attack
surfaces."
--
Jon
Clemenson, director of Security Technology, TokenEx
"During
the past year, with the pandemic forcing a change in traditional work
environments, security professionals in all industries are still grappling with
how to address the increased vulnerabilities and risks that come from expanding
the corporate network to accommodate remote workers.
These
circumstances should trigger a comprehensive review of security policies and
controls to determine if additional technologies or processes are required to
address new risks created by remote working.
The
onus for securing sensitive data and making sure that consumers are protected
remains on the organization regardless of where employees are working from.
Technologies such as tokenization, which swaps sensitive data for a ‘token'
that holds no intrinsic value or relationship to the original data set, can
remove sensitive data from the network entirely. As companies plan for future
work arrangements, tokenization can give organizations flexibility in their
decision making without risking the compromise of their most sensitive data."
--
Michael Jack, chief revenue officer, Datadobi
"The past
year has tested us as individuals, stretched organizations thin, and reshaped
society in ways that we can't fully understand yet. We've pushed through when
we needed to and changed course when we had to. It's been hard but the
resilience displayed all around has been impressive. Through it all we've
turned to technology at a scale that we never have before. Social media has kept
us connected, work is being done virtually, and commerce has shifted online in
a massive way.
Moving
our essential activities online isn't new but this past year has increased that
shift exponentially. This has caused a substantive increase in the amount of
unstructured data being created just going about our everyday lives. We're
seeing data sets growing at monumental rates and organizations are trying to
handle new unanticipated challenges in data management. It's my view that in
the same way that many individuals have benefited from a little extra support
in their daily lives, organizations could use closer and more personalized
support in a world that is digitally transforming faster than may have been
expected a year ago.
Organizations
need support from data management solutions that addresses and tailors
migration solutions to be as beneficial as possible and provide data mobility
capabilities that understand and adjust to a rapidly changing world. As we move
forward into what's next, being able to offer individualized support for unique
organizations can be a make-or-break factor in many data migration or
protection projects. The best data management solutions in the days ahead will
be the ones that understand that. As we pass beyond what felt like the twilight
of civilization into the dawn of what comes next, a little support can make all
the difference."
--
Brian
Raboin, COO, Pathwire
"As
we approach the one-year mark of the rapid shift in workplace practices, it's
been a steep learning curve for nearly everyone impacted. Email has always been
a critical part of many organizations' communication practices, but the remote
evolution has heightened its importance.
At
this time last year, newly distributed work practices required frequent check
ins with employees, whether it was for questions about the internet not working
at home or how to properly navigate using their personal email. These
communications through email were necessary at the onset of the outbreak and
have continued to show their worth in keeping employees connected from afar.
Email
deliverability has also become essential for survival for many companies.
Organizations that did a good job in terms of keeping their customer database
info relevant were able to take advantage of that. Non-traditional and
non-email-first companies, however, might have struggled to adjust. Restaurants
and gyms, whose close-contact physical locations were widely shuttered, for
instance, were hanging on by a thread, and if they didn't communicate with
their customers properly, they would have been at an even greater risk of
collapse. The ones that kept their heads above water used email to stay in
front of customers and keep them engaged. For organizations where email was not
a necessity, it very quickly became one.
As
we move forward to a more typical sense of normalcy, asynchronous communication
will be something that still exists as organizations evaluate the need for
remote work and if it's practical to continue going forward. Some organizations
have had staff that are remote, but COVID leveled the playing field.
Distributed team members are just as important, and organizations that keep
this approach in place will continue to use the best practices learned over the
past year as a part of their overall communication strategies. Email strategy
has to be critical to that, and for those that were able to leverage these new
strategies to communicate with their customers will reap the rewards in the
present and continue to do so in the future."
--
Gina O'Reilly, COO, Nitro
"It's
hard to believe that we've been completely remote for an entire year now. While
most of us have adapted to this new way of working, many are still feeling
overwhelmed and stressed. In fact, a recent survey
found over 90% of workers feel stressed while working from home, with 41% feeling either extremely or very stressed.
This
isn't surprising considering how many people are dealing with financial worries
and job security while also trying to stay healthy, take care of children, and
maintain some form of social contact with friends and family. Managing all of
that and juggling work deliverables, makes working from home that much more
stressful.
Interestingly
enough, much of the WFH stress has come from a lack of document productivity
tools. Eighty-three percent of workers said the way their company handles
documents has not improved significantly during the pandemic, which is
concerning given over 60% work with more than six documents a day.
WFH
(at least in some capacity) is here to stay, so companies should reevaluate
their technology stack to better fit and adapt to this ‘new normal'. Providing
access to the right set of digital tools can help employees thrive in the
future of work and take unnecessary stress off their shoulders."
--
Meg
Riat, Human Resources Director, Leaseweb
USA
When
I reflect upon the last year, as an HR Director, I can pinpoint several
positive changes that impacted my team and the industry more broadly. 2020
brought significant unforeseen challenges--and they were incredibly
difficult--but I'd encourage every HR professional to examine the challenges
they endured last year, and seek out and acknowledge the resulting
successes.
For
us at Leaseweb USA, we've focused on learning ways to realistically effect a
healthy work-life balance for our staff. Burnout has historically been very
high in IT, but that's only increased during the pandemic. During the pandemic,
wise leaders realized that they need to actually enforce their
employees' work-life balance on their behalf. Even for me, someone who harps on
healthy work habits for our employees, found myself looking at the clock and
realizing I hadn't gotten up from my desk since 8 a.m. This just goes to show
that we have to be intentional in order to maintain a healthy work
culture.
We
began introducing step challenges and non-work-related events like virtual
bingo, workouts and book clubs last year. We've learned that there is a sweet
spot when it comes to requiring video in meetings - at first, we set up video
for every meeting, but then recognized it was most effective in smaller team
settings. We've mastered the skill of creating a positive onboarding experience
for employees with zero face-to-face interaction (something I never thought I'd
do).
Despite everything going
on, we have been able to maintain a culture of togetherness, resiliency and
supportiveness that I believe has allowed our employees to feel more
comfortable, motivated and appreciated, even if they're working from their
living room."
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