Industry Wrap № 7.
And that’s a wrap! Next Dimension curates the most practical and useful tools and strategic IT insights from the web.
This week we shared articles across our social media covering the following topics: Simplify Your Infrastructure, IT ROI and, IT Strategy to enable Business Strategy
Looking for details? Continue reading to see more.
Simplify Your Infrastructure
82% of businesses said they needed greater IT support during the pandemic, a move to a simplified IT model can help with this problem.
Workers need to know that their organizations can respond quickly and with agility to any event. This was reflected in the top challenges cited by workers thrust into remote work situations: 82% mentioned the need for greater IT support; 77% worried about maintaining customer service levels and satisfaction; and another 76% feared a disruption of workflow and processes.
The huge shift in the number of employees working from home created changes like the loss of a joint kitchen and those watercooler-style exchanges. It did end up empowering employees to adapt to the change; 67% have implemented social video conferencing “meetups” to compensate for lack of face-to-face social interaction, and 54% have implemented social chat channels.
Collaboration technology is critical as we move into the next iteration of work. Together with modernized IT architectures, Cisco Webex has proven it’s worth many times over and stands ready to meet new challenges and changing work habits.
IT ROI
The shift to remote work put a strain on IT, with 72% of businesses feeling unprepared. Have you prioritized remote technology resources to sustain operations?
Returning to a pre-pandemic office scenario is a long way away, tech industry forerunners such as Microsoft have already pushed a full return to the office until the last quarter of the year, with similar policies rolled out at Google, Facebook and Twitter. For 82% of the workforce at surveyed organizations, a return to company headquarters is expected in 12 to 18 months, on average.
The long tail of remote work put a strain on tech organizations, leaving business executives to support the backbone of distributed operations in the wake of hiring freezes, budget cuts and layoffs. The tech side of the C-suite is also expected to devote resources to supporting contact tracing and other tech tools designed to keep workers safe in a phased office comeback.
Rapid transformation resulted in the redistribution of both the workforce and the workloads. Is it time to consider a simpler, more agile IT strategy?
Datacenter and cloud networking agility provides the ability to react quickly to changes and goes way beyond traditional measurements of speeds and feeds. Here are some of the capabilities that Gartner uses to evaluate data center and cloud networking solutions. From hardware to network operating systems to management solutions are all drivers of agility and business resiliency.
In particular, these three use cases that are top of mind for many enterprises IT teams for evaluating data center networking solutions:
1. Enterprise Refresh/Build-Out Use Case. Includes switch hardware, Network Operating System (NOS), management, and automation integrations.
2. Agility Boost Use Case. Based on management platform independence, automation, hyper-converged infrastructure integrations, and public cloud integrations.
3. DevOps Driven Organization Use Case. Day 1 and Day 2 automation and data center platform integrations.
More products, more problems? A complex IT system can lead to security flaws, moving to a simplified infrastructure offers more robust security.
As cybercriminals continue to find new ways to breach security defences, keeping your organization secure may start to feel overwhelming. Unfortunately, security teams that feel inundated by tools and disparate data can experience cybersecurity fatigue or the feeling that they simply can’t keep up with incoming threats. To avoid overwhelming security teams it recommends focusing on the threats your organization is most vulnerable to experiencing. Getting to know which threats most impact you and prioritizing accordingly is a great way to simplify your security approach, and may help when deciding which solutions are worth investing in.
With a solid foundation and a good understanding of what to prioritize, you may find it easier to incorporate relevant security solutions without adding undue complexity. Check out these tips on simplifying your security operations.
IT Strategy to Enable Business Strategy
Two-thirds of executives are focused on cost optimization, another 34% said they are prioritizing operational efficiencies. What if both were possible?
Technology has become the backbone that supported company operations and making sure there were no distributed work and a smooth transition to digital processes wherever possible. For 72% of business executives the pandemic and the disruption, it introduced altered their priorities. Execs came into 2020 with planned digital transformation roadmaps that no longer matched the context businesses operate in.
Two-thirds of decision-makers honed their focus on cost optimization, while another 34% said they prioritized operational efficiencies, according to TBM Council data.
The shift is slated to impact global tech spend, according to Gartner projections. Worldwide IT spending will reach $3.5 trillion in 2020, marking a 7.3% decrease from 2019 levels. Amid the contraction, infrastructure as a service is expected to grow by 13.4%.
Follow us on Facebook or Twitter and never miss an update. Prefer a weekly recap? Join our Community (on the right) and be notified when our Industry Wrap is published each week.