Vincentas Grinius, CEO at Heficed, said some of the changes to the industry bought in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic are here to stay.
Grinius said that unable to resume business as usual, workers continued to carry out their daily tasks from the comfort of their homes. Companies pivoted their IT budgets to VoIP services, secure VPNs, remote desktop protocols, and other solutions aimed at streamlining collaboration among employees.
While at first the shift was intended to be temporary, soon enough many adopted a more flexible, or even a permanent approach. Thus, WFH (work-from-home) infrastructure development will remain highly relevant in order to accommodate the ever-growing number of remote workforce.
Grinius said: “It is unlikely that workers will ever fully return to the pre-pandemic state as most have acknowledged the various benefits of remote work, such as less time spent commuting, less distractive environment and others. Providing secure and reliable access to a company’s network will only grow in importance in order to sustain the same high-level process quality as in-office.”
Hybrid cloud solutions
Grinius said that during the pandemic, the matter of moving to cloud-based infrastructures went from being optional to a must-have integration for mid to large scale companies seeking to sustain its operational capacity further on. A study by KPMG confirms the shift in opinion, as 1 in 2 executives have reported cloud migration has become an absolute necessity. That said, IT professionals turned their heads to hybrid cloud solutions, as opposed to full switch, as it enables to leverage in-house assets alongside cloud-provided benefits.
“Partial integration with cloud mitigates the possible risks of service disruption in case of in-house server issues. As part of the infrastructure remains on-premise, it eases the pressures related to the integration process, as well as puts less strain on a company’s budget”, he said,
AI-supported cybersecurity
COVID-19 sparked a significant increase in ransomware. With a sky-high level of cyber threats, companies shifted their focus on minimising dependencies on human resources as much as possible and instead reduced to tackling cyber threats with AI-driven solutions. According to Grinius, scammers will only become more technologically sophisticated further down the line, thus AI and deep learning are next in line in preemptive measures that would help limit their impact.
“Using AI-supported preemptive measures will enable to react and respond to network abnormalities in real-time, putting a swift end to criminal activity towards the system. AI-supported cybersecurity solutions are likely to remain one of the key areas of interested for all companies, aiming to prevent their data falling in the hands of fraudsters”, Grinius said.
