While things are slow during the summer, IT leaders should be thinking of technology initiatives to undertake at the end of 2020. Take time while you are enjoying the sunshine and warm weather to contemplate IT goals and how you can align your technology strategies with business goals.
Here are 4 technology topics that your company should be considering this summer:
1) Remote Workplace
Most companies have needed to spin up remote workplaces in response to the pandemic. Some companies were prepared and others may not have been.
Now is a good time to assess your remote workplace solutions and support. Are your plans for remote work hardened and secure? As temporary remote workplaces turn into long-term workforce strategies, organizations must protect their network and endpoints from potential threats. They should also be ready to adjust bandwidth to meet increasing demands.
To accommodate a remote workforce, businesses need to have a nimble infrastructure that can handle shifts in workload traffic. Tools must be in place to detect malicious traffic and prevent intrusions. Protecting remote workers while they’re off the network must also be a priority. DNS protection and other strategies can help reduce the risk of threats like ransomware or other malicious attacks.
Moving to the cloud or working with a managed service provider can also help by keeping your employees out of the data center. Now more than ever, your organization may want flexibility and an ability to adapt to changes in operations–something the cloud or a managed service provider is well suited for.
2) Cloud Services
Companies want more flexibility in how they procure technology services. Executives want their organization to stay nimble and be flexible to changing conditions. Instead of paying upfront, organizations can use the cloud for “as a service” offerings, shifting the cost from CapEx to OpEx and giving them the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Cloud services enable companies to obtain services as needed and to pay as they go. These services may include infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), as well as security, DevOps, and container capabilities.
3) Disaster Recovery
Preparedness is on everyone’s mind these days. There is an important lesson you can learn from the pandemic: When you least expect it, expect it. Now is the time to reassess your disaster recovery plan and determine if it is robust and agile enough to protect your company from a major traumatic incident.
Disaster recovery is about being flexible enough to respond to anything. Downtime can be caused by many factors, such as a natural disaster, an equipment failure, or human error. Even a cyberattack can trigger extensive downtime.
Forbes argues that traditional approaches to disaster recovery won’t work for today’s rapidly changing businesses. Disaster recovery and business continuity mean more than having a secondary site for redundancy. Companies must take into account all the applications that rely on business continuity to function.
Your company may also be concerned about having the right staff on hand to mitigate risk. Taking on a managed service provider ensures your organization has experts available who have seen everything and know exactly what to do to recover quickly and completely from any type of disaster.
4) Collaboration
Workforce, a company that develops workplace software, emphasizes that during the pandemic, communicating with workers in ways they prefer is essential to their ongoing satisfaction. Some employees may be accustomed to working remotely using unified communications (UC), and others may need more time to adjust.
Now is the time to rethink your approach to business collaboration. Is your company just getting by or are you progressing? Think about how your business can create richer collaboration experiences.
Video conferencing and WebEx can make working remotely feel more like being in the same room with colleagues. Meetings become an opportunity to reconnect with coworkers, see their faces, and hear their voices.
Hitting the Ground Running
Taking a little time to think about these technology topics while you are manning the grill, relaxing poolside, or heading to the beach will set your company up for success in the final quarters of 2020. Make the second half of the year count by finding the right partners to make some key initiatives happen.
FirstLight has all the resources your company needs to leverage network, cloud, and collaboration solutions. We also provide managed services for servers, security, network, and applications. Our team can make the initiatives you envision this summer a reality.
Share your plans for the rest of 2020 with FirstLight. Contact us today.
