Now that the pandemic is halfway into its second year, it’s safe to say that a lot has changed. No CEO, regardless of how knowledgeable they were about technological or commercial trends, could have foreseen the changes that Covid-19 would bring about. Our need to adapt to new business models, both at home and away from branch offices, has caused many businesses to rethink how they use technology. Internet and digital platforms have become the heart of daily business, and user experience has become crucial to both staff productivity and consumer happiness.

So, how does today’s new business reality appear? And what should companies be thinking about going forward?

more technologically savvy personnel

For many of us, social interactions or entertainment dominated our internet interactions up until last year. However, with the recent acceleration of digital change, family life, professional life, and education are all becoming more digital. Even employees who had previously avoided technology have grown acclimated to new business practises and the use of collaboration tools to keep in touch amongst dispersed teams.

In order to perform their jobs effectively, employees will need to become acclimated to using digital technologies, which will lead to the formation of a new hybrid workforce and the need for additional digital skills. Understanding how to use digital resources is not just a differentiator now but also something that will be required in the future.

Edge protection is essential.

Security teams are considering their alternatives in the interim. Now, security and other delicate corporate IT operations must be implemented successfully in the remote office. This implies that security mechanisms such as VPNs, secure gateways, and other ones are being moved to the network’s edge and closer to remote workers. As a result, the delivery of these solutions now depends on public networks, such as cloud service providers, ISPs, and SaaS products.

Even the most assured CEOs will feel anxious because of that. Nevertheless, whether you like it or not, remote work is a reality. And with this in mind, we’ll observe businesses taking a closer, longer-term look at secure remote access solutions.

An boom in SaaS

It goes without saying that apps are today’s essential to every business. They govern how businesses deliver their goods, how workers complete their tasks, and how clients use services. We would be lost without them, and the past year has just made this more apparent. Consider all the programmes you use every day, such as WebEx, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and Sage. However, SaaS usage is nothing new; it has been growing for a while, and this trend will persist in the post-pandemic future. In fact, according to Gartner, global spending on SaaS solutions will increase by $20 billion in 2021 compared to 2020.

Organisations should think about how to optimise these experiences for a hybrid workforce as SaaS continues to play an increasingly important role in company efficiency. Because SaaS apps frequently operate across various clouds, regions, and data centers—environments outside the IT perimeter and outside the control of IT staff—using them in large numbers presents a challenge. Therefore, even if the public internet is a vital component of the delivery infrastructure, it also creates serious visibility problems for IT.

In the past year, enterprise infrastructure has undergone significant change to enable an increase in users who work remotely. Data used to move from branch offices to the data centre, but now there is a snowflake effect, requiring IT to monitor, control, and optimise the movement of data to and from distant employee offices via the cloud and Internet service providers, which is crucial because it is outside the control of the organisation.

Businesses are nevertheless expected to own the user experience, whether it be that of an employee or a client, even though they may not operate or own these services. Expectations for the user experience have increased dramatically over the past year as both parties have grown accustomed to digital-first services.

But our heavy reliance on the Internet and ecosystem of third-party providers over the past year only highlights how fragile the user experience can be if one or more of these services go down. is.

A new way to monitor your new routine

I’m starting to learn that to deliver this streamlined digital experience, I need to look beyond her four walls of digital. Adoption of the cloud and her SaaS solutions was happening and accelerating long before the pandemic impacted our lives. IT leaders are already getting used to the idea of ​​giving up control of the networks we rely on. But the pandemic has pushed us all into excess. Traditionally, organizations were equipped with network monitoring tools and separate solutions for monitoring application performance. This means that the data is often disjointed. However, this model no longer makes sense for him in 2021. Today’s organizations need correlated insights that provide end-to-end visibility across web, cloud, and application tiers, including delivery and performance, no matter where their users are in the world. increase.

Remote work is now happening on a scale never seen before and perhaps never predicted. The result is a significant and systemic impact on the technology stack as we know it. Traditional enterprise networks have been redesigned to be more resilient and adaptable, and user experience has become a critical feature for any business.

This comes with a ray of hope. A series of new innovations are already helping organizations adapt and accelerate their digital transformation, and now in the real world as well. New solutions are emerging to provide the visibility, security, and governance IT leaders need as they tap into complex webs of Internet-dependent application architectures. Welcome to the new corporate reality.