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Greg Fazekas

Recovering from COVID-19: transforming today’s networks for enterprise success tomorrow

If your business wants to survive and thrive after the pandemic is over, connectivity needs to remain a top priority.

May 6th, 2020

COVID-19 came out of nowhere quickly and upended the world. And it’s far from over. While some countries are capable of starting to loosen restrictions, some are still reeling from the impact of the pandemic on their economy.

Such global shifts always expose the vulnerabilities in the fabric of our lives. Everyone is scrambling to adapt: from governments to local communities, from global businesses to individuals.

We thought we’d take a closer look at what could come next. We’ll have lives to live and businesses to run after the dust settles. But to do that, decision-makers need to start acting today.

Digital transformation is no longer optional

Disruption is abound, and it’s a word that has been thrown around with abandon. It’s been a business buzzword for quite a while. But “disruption is simply change without time to resist it.” And COVID-19 surely brought disruption to all.

One of the chief lessons we’ve learned from COVID-19 is the essential nature of connectivity. Connectivity has shown to be a top priority in these past months: from the infrastructure or culture of remote work, to the operational methods and asset distribution of business processes.

And, if your business wants to survive and thrive after the pandemic is over, connectivity needs to remain a top priority. Digital transformation is the process through which connectivity is built and strengthened. “Future-proofed,” if you will.

Future-proof connectivity

When connectivity is the priority, many first look at the infrastructure.  And rightly so: without the backbone of the network, the routers and switches and servers and data centers,  connectivity is weak and vulnerable at best. But even with the right equipment in the right places, it’s not “future-proofed” if management processes are still stuck in the past.

For example, migrating your IT from on-premise to a corporate data center may have seemed like a smart move just a short while ago. It still is,  but we’ve seen business IT practically disabled, because personnel couldn’t enter their data center (due to COVID-19) to plug into the console they needed to manage their network.

Working remotely isn’t limited to staff. If you want future-proof operations, you need to make sure your infrastructure is accessible at all times.

IT realities in a post-COVID-19 business world

It may be hard to see past the immediate impact of COVID-19 on the world.  And businesses are right, both morally and financially, to mitigate the short-term effects of the pandemic first — but they also need to  recognize the long-term need for change.

The world felt like a comfortable place just a few months ago. Innovation was fascinating, but still afar. Change was always looming on the horizon but didn’t require immediate action.

Today, however, businesses need to balance looking into the future. What happens six months or a year from now is decided today.

During the coming weeks, we’ll cover all the topics that create the escape route from the current situation for businesses. Our topics will range from Internet-of-Things (IoT) to Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0, from single and multicloud to edge computing.

All these seemed like fancies of the future up until recently, but they will become not only an everyday reality but the very solution businesses need to survive.