{"id":367,"date":"2021-07-23T13:39:10","date_gmt":"2021-07-23T13:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pendulum-it.com\/?p=367"},"modified":"2021-07-23T13:39:11","modified_gmt":"2021-07-23T13:39:11","slug":"emerging-from-the-pandemic-stronger-how-to-thrive-not-just-survive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pendulum-it.com\/emerging-from-the-pandemic-stronger-how-to-thrive-not-just-survive\/","title":{"rendered":"Emerging from the pandemic stronger – How to thrive not just survive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Emerging<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Even though we are not yet out of the grip of the COVID-19 crisis, it is already clear who the winners in business are. Broadly speaking, those organisations with built in flexibility, that were able to innovate, take opportunity where threat existed and utilise their infrastructure to do it, have done well; achieving in months what would normally take years. A lot of this success could be put down to those organisations having effective business continuity strategies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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About the Author<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Senior Account Manager, Jeffrey Magara helps Global Enterprise & SME clients to deliver consolidating, cost saving IT solutions and projects. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

According to a McKinsey Global Survey in 2020 of executives, these companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations, by three to four years. And the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios, has accelerated by a shocking seven years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, there were some industry sectors that were better placed than others, especially those involved in e-commerce, who had the capacity and power to access stocks. Moving away from the headline winners though, there are organisations that have managed, through their digital infrastructure, to survive the drastic measures of lockdowns, which saw their workplaces deserted and a paradigm shift to remote working. Based on research carried out by McKinsey, companies that are involved in manufacture have changed the least, regardless of whether they are in B2C or B2B. The companies that have embraced and developed their digital portfolio have been in healthcare, pharma, financial services and professional services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scalable organisations, that invested and accelerated digital technologies, such as cloud, have shown a remarkable turn of speed against predicted time. The following graph from McKinsey demonstrates not only the impressive speed of adoption, but the key areas that have been invested in:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"McKinsey<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Embracing cloud technology <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The term \u2018scalability\u2019 offered by cloud computing is often banded about, but what are the real-term benefits of having this resource in-place? To put it in very basic terms, it has meant that those enterprises who had adopted a cloud infrastructure, were able to respond to the increased demand swiftly, meaning the difference between coping with the demand and their website being shut down because it was unable to handle the un-precented volume. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The benefits of cloud infrastructure have allowed enterprises to order more stock quickly and pack it and despatch it more swiftly. Having that ability to increase capacity and speed, when needed, could be the difference between thriving or \u2026 not!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also allows enterprises to experiment with new products\/services, shortening \u2018time to market\u2019 to days and enabling versatility to switch on and switch off when needed. According to a Centrify survey carried out in Autumn 2020, 51% of business leaders stated that the shift to cloud computing has saved them from collapse during the pandemic. Given this success, 60% also said that they are planning to substantially increase their cloud infrastructure as we move hopefully out of the pandemic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remote working has been one the biggest successes during the pandemic and probably caught the most media attention, justifiably. Customer service departments that switched to remote working were able to do so and deal with increases in demand from customer calls, as well as still being able to process industry compliant payments. Remote working of this type has also allowed enterprises to offer an increase in customer service, sometimes moving to a 7-days-a-week model, which wasn\u2019t previously viable. Due to the relatively low-cost entry points, remote access has allowed even small companies to collaborate and remain operational, despite being geographically distant; still having access to critical software and shared collaborative tools. I am sure, if remote working strategies weren\u2019t in organisations business continuity planning before, they certainly will be now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using data to drive decision making<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Being a data driven organisation can bring many benefits, including effective and improved decision making, proactive responses to customer needs and the imperative ability to stay ahead of the competition with innovative ideas and methods. Nothing new there, I hear you say, however, the sheer time and cost of collecting these insights into your business can be crippling, not to mention very time consuming. Alongside this, the sheer volume of data from varying sources, some incomplete, means data may only be used to back up an opinion for decision making, rather than as a main driving force for change. We haven\u2019t mentioned the cultural barriers, where data isn\u2019t accessed and acted upon consistently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cloud services are playing a crucial part in making data-based decisions a reality, and one which is bringing great advantage to those enterprises that leverage it. They allow accessibility and response to immediate business demands for data and analytics. What\u2019s more, they provide a level of skills not often present within the enterprises, to be able to keep pace with big data analytics innovation at a much lower cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For enterprises wishing to get started in analytics, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) route may be a good place to start, offering scalability for multiple users, ongoing software updates, and maintenance. This can be extended to add further value by taking on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), to build custom applications. With PaaS, the provider is able to deliver a solution stack integrated set of software, providing an enterprise\u2019s developers with tools to build an application.
\nThe power of this data analysis cannot be underestimated, with enterprises who have adopted this approach able to constantly analyses data from many customer touch points and roll out a campaign in real time, based upon that data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Key benefits of SaaS Analytics:<\/strong>
\u2022 No requirement to have inhouse expertise and capacity
\u2022 The ability to rapidly scale storage and compute requirements
\u2022 Significant cost reductions compared with inhouse solutions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ensuring resilience with well thought out and tested Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) plans <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The possibility of organisations being subject to cyberattacks that can cripple a business or permanently destroy its IT systems, are very much a reality these days. Despite the many advantages of cloud infrastructure, digital transformation and hyper-convergence creates unintended gateways to risks, vulnerabilities, attacks and failures. As part of an enterprise\u2019s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans, a cyber resilience strategy is essential, that can support a business to withstand disruptive cyber incidents. Such plans often include ways to defend against those risks, protect critical applications and data, and recover from breach or failure in a controlled, measurable way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, many enterprises struggle to evolve their resiliency strategies quickly enough to tackle today\u2019s hybrid IT environments and changing business demands. The reality of our always-on 24-7 world, is that enterprises can often gain competitive advantage, or lose market share, depending on how their IT resources serve their core business needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Business Continuity Management Services<\/strong> are one possible solution for enterprises to protect their business, by identifying and addressing resiliency synchronisation between business processes, applications and IT infrastructure. This kind of service can provide flexible business continuity and disaster recovery, consulting to address a company\u2019s needs \u2013 including assessments, planning and design, implementation, testing and full business continuity management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the growth of cyberattacks, enterprises are moving from a traditional\/manual recovery approach to an automated and software-defined resiliency approach. This method uses advanced technologies and best practices to help assess risks, prioritise and protect business-critical applications and data. These services can also help business rapidly recover IT during and after a cyberattack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An alternative path could be to opt for cloud-based backup services; Disaster-Recover-as-a-Services (DRaaS)<\/strong>, to provide continuous replication of critical applications, infrastructure, and data and systems for rapid recovery after an IT outage.
There are also virtual server options, to protect critical servers in real-time. This enables rapid recovery of applications to keep businesses operational during periods of maintenance or unexpected downtime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along the lines of the above solutions, the answer is with resiliency orchestration; a cloud-based approach that uses disaster recovery automation and a suite of business continuity management tools, designed specifically for hybrid-IT environments. This approach helps protect business process dependencies across applications, data and infrastructure components. It increases the availability of business applications, so that companies can access necessary high-level or in-depth intelligence regarding Recovery Point Objective (RPO), Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and the overall health of IT continuity, from a centralised dashboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n