The future of work is not about where you are, but about how quickly you can move. While most organisations are “keeping the lights on” by supporting remote work, market leaders are capitalising by reforming their entire approach.

1. Topics
Cloud & Edge
Computing
Editor's Choice
17 June 2020
The bene ts of cloud
technology for remote
working
Stephen Manley, chief technologist at Druva, discusses the
bene ts of cloud technology for remote working
Cloud technology plays a bigger role in operations than ever.
The future of work is not about where you are, but about how
quickly you can move. While most organisations are “keeping
the lights on” by supporting remote work, market leaders are
capitalising by reforming their entire approach.
As remote working has become the “new normal”, businesses
have replaced informal discussions with online messaging,
augmented data centres with the cloud, and secured their
data from outages and cyber attacks with SaaS solutions.
After their initial steps into the cloud, leading organisations
then use cloud to enable employees to make decisions more
quickly, business teams to expand more aggressively, and IT
to connect with the business more meaningfully.
Laying the foundation
To survive, businesses rst need to make remote workers as
productive as possible, which means keeping them
connected, getting them the resources they need, and
protecting them. Across virtually every industry, cloud-based
collaboration has supplanted in-person interactions.
Everybody thinks of Zoom meetings, Slack messages, and
sharing documents with Microsoft O ce 365, but the value of
connectivity extends beyond meetings and documents. For
example, doctors connect with patients via telehealth services
so they can reduce the risk to the patients and decrease the
load on the hospitals. Cloud collaboration has literally been a
lifeline to keep our society moving forward while remote
working.
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To support the natural growth of their applications,
organisations then must plan on expanding their
infrastructure. Since supply shortages have constrained data
centre expansion, most companies have turned to the cloud
as a safety value. By migrating simple workloads to IaaS and
SaaS solutions, they free up resources for their business-
critical applications.
To keep their environments safe and compliant, IT is adopting
SaaS protection solutions. Cybercrime is on the rise, and
remote workers provide an ideal target for phishing around
Covid-19. While preventing a ransomware attack is ideal,
teams need to ensure they can recover from an attack. With a
cloud protection solution, the data and control is “air-gapped”
so ransomware protection and recovery is automatically built
in. Then, since the entire environment — endpoints, SaaS
applications, cloud and data centre – can be attacked by
ransomware, they protect everything.
Accelerating the business
The biggest mistake during challenging times is to focus only
on survival, because the companies that prepare to accelerate
become the market leaders when the economy rebounds.
Still, leaders understand that moving too early is almost as
dangerous as moving too late, so they ensure that any
investment is elastic. Currently, we’re seeing teams invest in
technology and processes to help them move with more
velocity and agility.
Agility begins with giving employees more autonomy to make
decisions. With remote work, consensus-based decision
making is almost impossible. Therefore, leaders are
empowering their employees to make data-driven decisions.
Since their data is protected in the cloud, teams can now
dynamically access and analyse data, and then release the
resources. With a minimum of cost, organisations can make
better, faster, and more decentralised decisions.
When business teams can deploy and expand applications on-
demand, the business moves with more velocity. Lines of
business need a secure, protected cloud platform so they can
provision new applications with a minimum of nancial and
compliance risks. The developers can then build and deploy
applications quicker because they are not waiting for capital
purchases or IT support. Fortunately, the secure, protected
cloud platform that IT built to migrate data centre workloads
can now serve the lines of business.
IT can then leverage its cloud platform to help the business
move even faster. Instead of troubleshooting infrastructure,
cloud and SaaS lets IT focus on compliance and business
requirements. When the world adjusts to this new landscape,
customers, employees, and regulators will expect more
transparency around data privacy Businesses will need to
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3. transparency around data privacy. Businesses will need to
nd and manage data for subject access requests, e-
discovery, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
requests. By shifting its focus from infrastructure
management to data management, IT handles the compliance
requirements while enabling the business to deliver solutions
for their customers.
"Two years on: Has GDPR been
taken seriously enough by
companies?"
Greg Hanson, vice-president EMEA and
LATAM at Informatica, discusses whether GDPR has
been taken seriously enough two years on from its
inception. Read here
Architectural considerations
While every company wants to use the cloud to take a market
leadership position, internal disagreements about public vs
private cloud have always slowed down these visions, but the
current remote working challenges should settle that debate.
When making any architectural decision, begin with the
requirements. Organisations require infrastructure that can
be scaled automatically in any region of the world. Businesses
need to move quickly without any capital expense. IT needs to
o oad both management of the infrastructure and core
services like data protection. Private cloud cannot meet these
requirements, so customers need a mix of public cloud and
SaaS applications.
Organisations should follow three rules as they shift to cloud
and SaaS. First, don’t use the cloud for applications and
workloads that require a complete re-architecture; you do not
need to shift wholesale to the cloud to lead the market.
Second, use SaaS applications for core services, rather than
trying to run them yourself. Third, understand your network
requirements and con guration. Nothing causes more
performance and security issues than network con guration
errors.
Nobody knows what challenges face us next, but companies
that embrace the agility and exibility of cloud and SaaS
solutions are best positioned to respond. Today, all
businesses are using the cloud to keep their businesses
running during Covid-19. Tomorrow’s leaders, however, are
investing in the cloud to drive the future of their business. The
future of work is here. Are you prepared?
Written by Stephen Manley,
chief technologist at Druva
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