Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Continuing Distributed Workforce and the Security Concerns that Come Along
By Andy Syrewicze, Tech Evangelist at Altaro – Part of Hornetsecurity Group
I feel like I’ve been saying this every year lately, but 2021 was another crazy year in IT. Despite many of us being done with COVID, it’s clear it isn’t done with us yet, and it has continued to change the way that businesses conduct operations the world over. If 2020 was the year many of us shifted to “work from anywhere”, 2021 is the year where we figured out that this mode of work is here to stay. With that in mind it’s clear that SaaS services like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Viva will continue to see increased rates of adoption across organizations of all kinds in the coming year. If you’re organization hasn’t started making this change, now is the time.
With a distributed workforce, comes the need for flexibility on the server side of the network as well. Workloads need to be available for end users working from anywhere. This will drive the increased need for public cloud usage. Those that are not ready to fully adopt the cloud will fall into a more hybrid design, which is easier than ever with the new hybrid cloud options being pushed by Microsoft such as Azure Stack HCI. The cloud-native integrations in that platform makes running and managing any workload, from anywhere, and easily, finally possible.
Finally, security will continue to be top of mind for many organizations. Regardless of your organization’s size, you will be a target at some point in time. Organizations will have to be very deliberate in their training of not only IT staff on security matters, but also end users. A hybrid workforce opens new doors for attackers to exploit, and it’s more important than ever for end users to be able to identify potentially malicious behavior BEFORE it becomes a problem.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andy Syrewicze, Tech Evangelist at Altaro – Part of Hornetsecurity Group
Andy is a 20+ year IT pro specializing in Virtualization, Storage, Cloud, and Infrastructure. By day he’s a Technical Evangelist for Hornetsecurity, leading in technical content. By night he shares his IT knowledge online or over a cold beer. He holds the Microsoft MVP award in Cloud and Datacenter Management, and is one of few who is also a VMware vExpert.
