With COVID-19 sweeping the nation, business continuity plans are being put to the test. This is creating a combined storm for enterprises, especially those that were already struggling to digitally transform their organizations prior to the global COVID-19 outbreak.
We, as leaders, change agents, or individual contributors, are all facing challenges and being tested in many aspects of our business landscape — from products and services to customer service, personnel, finance, supply chain, IT, and operations. Any one of these things would have strained the processes and outcomes of an enterprise in the past, and combining them is creating additional stress and necessitating immediate changes to our everyday lives.
However, some organizations are weathering this storm more successfully than others. These are organizations that have already established and made strides in their digital transformation and cloud strategies. The advancements they have achieved in their pre-COVID transformation efforts have assisted with their work-from-home transition, enabling them to maintain operations in the midst of difficulty while providing the foundation to become agile with infrastructure, apps, and data services for their employees and customers.
In contrast, organizations that have not advanced their capabilities or have minimized their digital transformations are struggling to maintain some of the capabilities they took for granted before, and they’re now scrambling to adapt.
Here’s a look at digital transformation before, during and after COVID-19, including actions you can take to keep business moving now and into the future.
Transformation Before COVID-19
Digital transformation was a hot topic for companies long before COVID-19, but it was being embraced slowly by many organizations. The focus was on minimizing change, reducing all possible risks, and raising the health and operational status of legacy infrastructure. It was a tactical and operationally-oriented approach — a first step, but not enough to support organizations through the current situation.
Transformation During COVID-19
Right now, we are all coming together to support our families, communities, colleagues, friends, and customers in every way we can. Many organizations are working hard to maintain services, products, and jobs while building remote work strategies on the fly to help them weather this storm.
The immediate need is all about supporting people, enabling a remote workforce, and keeping the business lights on. This is where options like Windows Virtual Desktop and rapid cloud migration come in to play, to quickly provide teams with access to critical data and applications from anywhere, and jump-start an organization’s transition to the cloud which will tap into the scalability, speed and security that organizations are seeking.
In addition, companies that have outsourced their Azure managed services overseas or need help handling the increased load of an entirely remote workforce should look to USA-based managed services, which will help mitigate the many risks of off-shore outsourcing. You can read more about COVID-19’s impact on overseas outsourcing here.
But beyond the current situation, we also need to plan for the future while we are addressing the current challenges. What are our immediate charges to carry us into a post-COVID world? How can we turn this world situation into a catalyst that will put us back on our feet and make us even stronger in the future?
Transformation Beyond COVID-19
In a post-COVID world, the question is no longer about if we want to transform, it’s about how fast we can reach our goals and transform our organizations to manage such storms in the future—whatever they may be.
Businesses need to maintain and expand their mobile workforce, establish solid work from home strategies, reduce office and data center footprints, and look to enable the technical and service capabilities to support these new operational principles.
Security is more important than ever and will be the focus of a workforce shift. Organizations, people and roles must be agile, flexible, and resilient to align to the same attributes surrounding the processes and activities that they perform. Businesses and their employees need the ability to focus on resolving customer challenges while still addressing their own.
In the future, as a business you must:
- Enable Your People: Shift the way people work, communicate and interact with applications and data to help them perform their job better. Care for them and enable them while maintaining security and communication.
- Evolve Your Infrastructure: Expand, grow, and transition infrastructure, apps, and data to be available when and where your teams need them. Not just at an office location, single in-house managed data center or co-location facility, but in the cloud and built to support a remote and mobile workforce.
- Adopt the Cloud: Moving to the cloud is more important now than ever in order to maintain products and services for customers and enable employees, regardless of what comes our way.
We Can’t Do This Alone
As businesses, and as human beings, we can’t do this alone, and we can’t rely upon a single region or core primary office to support operations. Post-COVID continuity planning must look to support a diversified and distributed workforce that can come together on a unified journey, support day to day operations, and jump in, extend, and maintain levels of operating, regardless of the location or situation we are placed within.
After everything the world is enduring right now, digital transformations and transitions to the cloud will only speed up. Businesses already on their way will need to go faster, those that haven’t yet started need to do so now, and it will require support from the right partner.
10th Magnitude was born in the cloud and we’ve helped countless companies make a rapid and secure transition to embrace all the cloud has to offer. We’re a Microsoft Gold Partner and Azure Expert Managed Services Provider and we’re here to help you. Contact our Rapid Response Team to schedule a call now.
