A Post-Pandemic Silver Lining: Working from Anywhere on the Cloud
There will be a broadening of cloud focus as enterprises prepare for a scenario where they will need to deftly juggle return to work, remote work, and hybrid work for the foreseeable future.
While there is no going back to a pre-pandemic working style, return to the office is making a gradual comeback. Anant Adya, senior vice president, cloud, infrastructure & security (CIS) services, Infosys, looks at what the future holds for the cloud in the post-pandemic years and how organizations can support the hybrid workforce better and enable growth.
Almost every organization, barring Tesla, which is mandating that workers log forty hours a week in-person, is settling into a rhythm of working some days from the office and the remainder from home. Now that remote working may be scaling back, does it portend a slowdown for the cloud, which was the foundation of work-from-home during the Covid years?
Anything but. According to Gartner, end-users will spend about 20 percent more on public cloud services this year (about $495 billion) than last and even more next year ($600 billion). However, there will be a broadening of cloud focus as enterprises prepare for a scenario where they will need to deftly juggle return to work, remote work, and hybrid work for the foreseeable future.
From “Sustaining” During the Pandemic to “Expanding” Once it is Over
The technology function became all-important once the pandemic broke out, when digital adoption meant survival for almost every organization. CIOs and CTOs will look to use their clout to drive cloud-based modernization programs. The mandate for the cloud will not only be business transformation but also business continuity to ensure that organizations are well-prepared to face any Covid breakout or other crisis in the future.
In these past two years, enterprises have acquired a mature understanding of the cloud. The pandemic has paved the way to a cloud-first strategy, such that increasingly, organizations will consider cloud-based solutions before any other, and migrate more of their workloads to the cloud.
Today, enterprises “get” that the cloud is not just a low-cost data center, but an engine of growth and innovation, which are their biggest priorities for recovering from the slump. The agility and scalability of the cloud will also be key to making up for lost time.
See More: Making the Shift From Legacy Systems to Cloud: Bottom Line Benefits
Supporting the Work, Workforce and Workplace of the Future
Folks may be showing up at work, but a very large number are staying home or operating in hybrid mode. In fact, hybrid working is so entrenched that companies insisting on a full return to the office could lose nearly 40 percent of their workforce. So, the post-pandemic workplace will wear a new look as organizations leverage various digital technologies – artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain and analytics – to enhance the work experience for in-office, fully remote, and hybrid-working employees. The public cloud will power all these technologies.
Enterprises will also have to welcome, for the first time, a new generation, that is, Gen Z, which attained working age around the time the pandemic started. These digital-born twenty-somethings may be quite accustomed to remote working, but they are keen to experience in-person work and do all the networking and relationship building that is best done face-to-face. Employers must cater to the expectations of these young people who will make up their talent pool in the future. That may call for modifying office spaces, supporting the recruits through onboarding and initial training, and giving them the development opportunities they seek.
Continuing that thought, one of the key objectives of organizations will be to prepare their workplaces for the future of work. Expanding cloud infrastructure in order to support the needs of a distributed workforce is the most important part of that agenda. Specifically, companies can look at cloud-based, digital employee experience management solutions that analyze employee sentiment and feedback to provide actionable insights for improving experience and engagement. They may also deploy unified endpoint management technologies to manage and govern all the employee devices connecting remotely to the corporate network to ensure security and compliance throughout the enterprise.
Google is expanding its cloud telephony service, Google Voice, in response to the hybrid workforce’s demand for phone systems that are not tied to a desktop instrument. The cloud-based phone service promises a better communication experience across devices and also efficiency by leveraging AI to block spam and transcribe voicemail.
Safeguarding the Workforce, and Their Workplace
Companies will intensify their focus on cloud security to defend against the threats posed by a variety of employee devices connecting from remote locations. Since enterprise data and systems are no longer confined to the corporate data center – having migrated to the cloud – nor accessed only through enterprise-controlled channels, securing the network perimeter is not enough. What they need is a user-centric approach to security that protects users, resources and assets wherever they may be located.
This is the principle of zero-trust architecture (ZTA). Apart from ZTA, enterprises may follow a Security as Code (SaC) approach to protect cloud-based workloads. Very important from a governance perspective in a hybrid/ distributed work scenario, both ZTA and SaC define security policies and standards and automatically enforce them.
Employers must ensure they have the right identity and access management (IAM) processes so that only
authorized users can access data, applications and other enterprise systems in a secure manner. They can also consider a cloud-based offering, namely desktop-as-a-service, that creates a virtual desktop on the cloud so that data is not stored on endpoints.
As employees slowly resume in-person work, they are returning to a workplace that is quite different from the one before the pandemic. The vast majority are making a partial comeback, opting for a hybrid working model so they can continue to work remotely on certain days. Enterprises, which owed their successful transition to remote working almost entirely to the cloud, must now turn to it once more to successfully manage in-office, remote, and hybrid work while maintaining organizational performance, employee experience, and overall security.
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