If you’re like many of our customers, your business fast-tracked some IT initiatives and investments earlier this year. What you achieved – employees working from home, customers supported, staying operational – is phenomenal.
You also probably moved at tremendous speed and may not have had the time to consider all the implications of each decision in the way you normally would. Discussions with our customers worldwide have revealed that the impact of this may be an issue in the long-term. You may have systems, applications, and processes that aren’t optimized to support newly adopted processes and activities, such as a huge increase in remote workers. Did you get to analyze all security implications and risks as you pivoted your business?
It’s time to ask: Did we get it right? What did we learn? Are we Future Ready?
Employees are working remotely but can they access applications and systems with ease? Are the networks and devices they are using secure (at least to enterprise level)? Analysis may show that your business-critical applications and infrastructure are stretched. And are the costs of any third-party cloud or SaaS solutions you adopted sustainable and reasonable? Your review may show that your business may not be as stable and secure as it appears, leaving you unready to adopt the new business models and ways of working.
There are five steps you need to take now to address these issues and become Future Ready:
1. Assess and audit: You need to assess the current situation and ask: What are the long-term implications? Have we assessed solutions, systems, end points for security issues, or gaps? What is the experience of our employees working from home? You need to ensure you’re operationally fit for the future and secure before you can move forward and become Future Ready.
2. Get secure & stable, build resilience, scale, and agility for business continuity: Where your audit finds issues, you need to respond. First, look to the solutions you have in place today. This will help you understand where you need to scale up or invest where you need to while keeping costs under control.
3. Keep taking care of your employees so they can take care of your customers: This has been a period of enormous change and emotional upheaval for employees. For many employees, working from home is anything but easy. You need to check: Can your employees access and use the platforms and applications easily? Are they getting the help and equipment they need? Are workers protected and using devices and connections that are secured to the level they need to be?
4. Define/re-define what Future Ready looks like for your organization: Some things you planned to do ‘next year’, you have achieved already. Perhaps you have put other initiatives on hold. As a result, you may realize that past assumptions are incorrect. You’ve likely identified better, smarter ways of development and deployment and learnt new skills as an organization. This presents an incredible learning opportunity and foundation for becoming Future Ready faster and more effectively, so adapt plans with this in mind.
5. Move forward and become Future Ready: Now you’re in a great position to move forward and accelerate your pace of change. You need to keep assessing the situation, but now you know that your business is better placed to address future change and risks.
It hasn’t been an easy journey, and the short and long-term remain hard to predict. To learn from the experiences of other organizations and gain unique insights from our experts register now for our online event: Get Future Ready Together with VMware and Atos. Our executive speakers will help you understand how you can assess the impact on your business and build on what you have today to mitigate any risks and get Future Ready now.
