Remote working has been on the rise in recent years, with more companies adapting their WFH policies or creating them if they weren’t in place before, allowing for more frequent and varied types of remote working.
In the case of business travel, remote working has been around for a while, whether it’s visiting clients or suppliers abroad or attending meetings in other cities, modern technology has propelled us into an era of working from almost anywhere. But in more recent times, business have started to adapt more and more to allow employees to live a better work/life balance or to manage things such as travel or childcare.
COVID-19 hit us at a time where many businesses were already well prepared for a fully remote working situation, but equally many businesses were not and may still be in that situation today.
This presents an opportunity for cloud-based businesses to prove themselves and for you as a reseller to provide more value to both existing and new customers than ever before.
Why now?
As the UK prepares itself for what looks like an exit from isolation and a slow rebuild of the damaged economy, many businesses will face the challenge of getting back to normal or creating a new ‘normal’ out of these recent changes.
Big companies like Facebook and Twitter have already made statements about how their workforces will continue to WFH permanently either fully or partially.
In a statement to TechCrunch, a Twitter spokesperson said,
“If our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen.”
Whilst it’s easy for some companies such as these to make decisions like this quickly and with a lesser impact on working life or company earnings, other companies often take a much slower approach to change their habits. But having been forced into a WFH situation by the impact of COVID-19 in 2020, we may see a much quicker adaptation to remote working at least in part, over the coming months and years.
What’s the opportunity?
Those businesses looking to move either partially or fully to a remote working situation or those threatened by a possible return to lockdown in the future will need to completely rethink their company infrastructure and fully embrace the cloud.
An increase in the use of devices such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops that allow employees to work from anywhere, will present an opportunity for you to give advice on solutions such as mobile security, collaboration & communication platforms and backup solutions as essential business tools.
As communication is a key part of an effective WFH strategy, it’s not surprising to see that use of Microsoft Teams rose by 70% in the first half of 2020, growing its user base to 75 million users per day.
Businesses are reacting to the changing landscape by forcefully adopting cloud-based products quickly and deploying them to their teams without careful planning in order to keep business going.
Remote training resources such as Nulia, (available in CASCADE) will become a useful tool to those companies who want to train their staff to use cloud software more efficiently and become more competent as they adapt to these changes. Whilst other solutions from Microsoft, Symantec and Acronis will help companies secure their devices and safely backup business-critical data at a time where Cyber Crime has skyrocketed!
In summary, it’s impossible to tell what will happen over the coming months as businesses prepare to return to ‘normal’ but it’s almost certain that cloud is now more important than ever, and business owners may finally be ready to open their eyes to the range of solutions that it can provide to their employees and their businesses.
For more information and guidance on COVID-19, please see our COVID-19 Partner Guide.