The Importance of IT Infrastructure during COVID-19

In recent months, the world has stopped due to the looming threat of coronavirus. Countries across the world have imposed lockdowns, travel bans, quarantines, and other social interactions. Businesses around the world are struggling to work normally as they face one of its biggest challenges that were predicted multiple times in the past. However, as the impact on our future life is unknown, IT has become the last option to get business up and running.

So the real question is “What is the impact of COVID-19 on IT infrastructure of business?”

Businesses are dealing with such crises for the first time and for some without a proper IT infrastructure there are several challenges they are facing such as

Businesses are not ready:

Companies are dealing with different numbers of employee and many of them exceed 500 employees. This simply means that they have dozens of VPN connections, based on an entry-level product from a major brand. This leads to a service disruption multiple times until the IT department moves and quickly fixed the problem.

Business are still discovering videoconferencing:

It’s the first time for many businesses to be using such platforms for meetings and conferences. Employees have previously used smartphones, and other devices for skype, Face time, and other video calling tools but concepts such as video conferencing is still new.

Document collaboration:

Applications such as Google Docs were launched several years ago, but there was still very limited exposure to them. However, the businesses using these platforms are still discovering useful tools for improving their productivity. Previously, the only online medium to share documents was via email.

Obsession with printing:

Many businesses still use hardcopies of documents to discuss them, making and replicating notes, and lastly making modifications in the original files. However, none of it is happening now. Employees are switching to softcopies for everything.

These are the few challenges businesses are facing, nevertheless, many are getting used to the new technology and the convenience it brings.  They are changing and improving their processes to embrace digital transformation.

IT, Viruses & Strategies

Organizations are still in a reactive mode and despite the current situation of the virus they are always under a constant threat of ransomware attacks, new technology, disaster recovery, business processes, and market changes. There is an unspoken need for them to be more proactive and agile. Today, with the ongoing pandemic organizations are facing an enormous test. After this test many businesses will falter while others will thrive.

Initially, working with IT infrastructure might be a little incontinent and complex but once users start their journey they can adopt it quickly. IT also offers several new tools too and processes which have the potential to increase productivity and offer several other benefits. The benefits of a good IT infrastructure are not just limited to pandemics, it can help businesses get through several types of disasters.

Most of the enterprises on a larger scale were already ready and looking for new improvements as their infrastructure was almost ready. Such organizations were able to activate new cloud resources and reconfigured their on-premises infrastructure as per their needs.

They opened up a cycle where they were gaining while their competitor and other businesses lost. In other cases, businesses were caught making the same mistakes and coming up with solutions that are inefficient. Such ineffective solutions suffocated their costs by adding to their budgets and thus reduced any opportunity to innovate service levels.

This works for all sizes of firms and local business able to adopt quickly by activating e-commerce and delivery service have already won new customers.

It has become crucial for businesses to reflect how they can succeed despite difficulties. Such businesses are setting the example that in order to survive the era of technology being flexible, reliable, and agile. Crises such as this pandemic arrive once in a decade but there could have been a cyber-attack, a natural disaster, a new regulation, a sudden drop of the market, or even an asteroid. This leaves us with the core idea that businesses have to step up and build up an IT strategy for any kind of rapid changes.

Below are some points that can help organization put together a disaster management system:

Organizations should set-up cloud as a key element of resilience strategy as it is both convenient and low-cost target.

Organizations should have manageability across IT infrastructure to ensure that staff, customers and operators are able to continuously do their job.

Organizations should avoid locking themselves into any one provider, service, and configuration.

Organizations should invest in good IT staff and enable them to be proactive and autonomous in decision making.

Organizations should use data to guide decision making in real-time and not based on historical reports.

Finally, all these steps may not sound like an actual investment, however, right now is probably the best time to think about new plans for the next time, because there is always a next time.

By Shreeya Chourasia

Writing is food to my soul and the quote that inspires me to keep learning is “Learning never exhausts the mind” by Leonardo da Vinci. Tech Research Online has given me a platform to do just that, I learn and I write and then I learn a little more.

LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreeya-chourasia-08079216a/

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