Long Term Covid Transformation or Just a Sticking Plaster?

Will we ever go back to the office and does your application stack work?

In the last 12 months, one of the largest transformational shifts in working patterns has taken place.  For some organisations this represented an acceleration of an already in-play strategy but for most it’s been thrust up on us as a result of Covid.

Several questions you should now ask yourselves:

  1. Will people return to the office voluntarily, by force, or will the new norm win out and will mobile working become a way of life?

For those organisations that have struggled to adapt to mobile working, and those autocratic employers (many of whom have already forced employees back in to the workplace), the outcome has probably already been decided and this can only lead to an increased turnover in staff as those that favour remote working vote with their slippers.

For others, the debate now rages as to whether we return to the office or take a blended approach.  Much will hinge on whether your employees are more effective working from home and this will depend on what tools that you have provided them with.  Quite a few companies are actually shutting real estate in the wake of this crisis and you can bet these were companies that were already on a cloud enabled journey. 

Some of our customers have closed offices and others are moving to a blend of home working and hot desking – InfoSecurity People can help you implement similar strategies and will happily share ideas on how best to implement this.

2. Does your application stack deliver in the new covid norm?

For those organisations that concede that transformation has been positive for morale and productivity, the question is now whether it’s possible to work smarter and make remote working better. Before delving in to the how’s and why’s, it pays to understand that prior to Covid, there was already a transformation taking place on the internet in the form of Cloud Computing and this accelerated very rapidly with companies rushing to buy in to whatever enablers helped employees to continue working.  In some cases, this scatter gun approach has led to disjointed cloud strategies being formed that only now employers are beginning to realise are too complex and increasingly unworkable.

Take a moment to count up the number of cloud applications you use – here are just a few to consider: Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Box, Zoom, Quickbooks, Cisco, Adobe, Zendesk, Shopify, Lucidchart, Github, Atlassian… and many, many more. 

Now consider how many more there are as a result of employees “hacking work” (often innocently) to enable them to do their jobs better!  The concept of “Hacking Work” is where employees use unsanctioned programs (Shadow IT) in order to enable them to work more efficiently.  You’ve only got to look at how many people email documents to their personal email to work on faster home computers, or the number of personal Dropbox and OneDrive accounts being used, to realise that this presents a massive security threat and relieves companies of the control over their data. 

As a result, corporate data is being scattered across the internet and most importantly outside of the EU through the use of Shadow IT which massively impacts your legal duties under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Regardless of the UK leaving the EU, this law is still relevant and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) will still come down hard on negligent data breaches.

InfoSecurity People can help with:

  • Cloud usage reports to highlight the use of legitimate and unsanctioned (shadow IT) cloud solutions
  • Implementation of secure networking to securely enable access to on-premise data
  • Cloud Strategy Planning and consolidation.
  • GDPR compliance including gap analysis and outsourced Data Processing Officers.
  • Security Strategies to shore up, simplify access and harmonise existing investment in cloud solutions.

No matter what size your business, if you want to get a handle on what cloud solutions your employees are using then InfoSecurity People can help.  Start by understanding the extent of the problem and then your strategy will follow.

Contact us to discuss any problems you might be having, we can help you find a solution: [email protected]