COVID-19: How Technology can make remote working seamless for business continuity

By Anthony Spiteri and Sandeep Bhambure

As COVID-19 hits India and continues to cause widespread disruption, large number of employees are increasingly choosing to work from home. While businesses are taking precautionary steps to support and protect employees, they are identifying ways to ensure data availability for employees in remote areas. Pandemics, floods, fires and other disasters around the world can disrupt business operations leading to loss in productivity and efficiency. Since the overall economic impact can be significant, many companies are learning to deal with these risk factors.

Amid the fears of the global pandemic, the main concern for businesses now is that 100% of their employees and data are protected, and available for a seamless business continuity. With more companies adopting flexible working and remote working practices to counter the COVID-19 disruption, data availability and protection across any cloud, network or platform is becoming even more important for seamless connectivity.

Adoption of cloud is important for effective remote working as it enables employees to collaborate, share and access any files and documents anywhere, anytime. According to Gartner, by 2022, up to 60% of organizations will use an external service provider’s cloud managed service offering.

Below are the three key areas that will ensure businesses can operate confidently through remote working and with zero-disruption to mission-critical data and services:

The growth of CDM
Easy access of data is the key to remote working, and cloud management supports just that. Data protection is also of importance, especially as we witness multiple data breaches in recent years.
Beyond 2020, we are looking at an increase in mobility and portability with cloud data management (CDM), while deploying additional security measures, as companies look to increase data accessibility within their workplace. CDM’s importance will only grow over the next year as easy, available and secure data becomes vital for businesses.

Continuous backup can spur transformation
Businesses must be conscious of how they are handling data across clouds and leverage better tools to back them up. According to Veeam 2019 Cloud Data Management report, almost a third of businesses now continuously backup and replicate high-priority applications. This number will increase as more businesses see the importance in easily recovering their critical data.

This decade, we will also see an increase in the number of platforms and tools for businesses to continuously backup their data across multiple platforms and perform full recovery within minutes. The same tools can also provide businesses with insights, helping them to make informed decisions in digital transformation and business acceleration strategies through research, development and testing purposes.

Adoption of different automation
As the world continues to ask for more efficiency at work, we will see increased automation in the areas of tasks and processes across organizations, supporting the replication of human work. One important example of automation Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Infrastructure automation, like IaC, allows organizations to configure and set up a complete infrastructure using a script while removing manual components.

While automation is not something that is inherently new, we will see those who have embraced it shifting toward combinations of different types of automation, including IaC. Through this, businesses can focus on more important projects.

Companies’ response to COVID-19 offers a perfect example on how businesses can maintain business continuity with technological innovations. Besides, by enabling employees to work remotely, they are also minimizing health risks and freeing them from the restrictions of locations and time.

One can never predict the scale of global crises, natural disasters, and world emergencies. However, the right technology can help. Businesses can achieve full digital potential despite the uncertainty over COVID-19 with a holistic cloud data management approach. It guarantees the availability of data across all storage environments and ensures more efficiency, thus maximizing profits. This pandemic is a wake-up call for businesses to ensure that data is available and protected for employees to access from remote areas.

(Anthony Spiteri is Senior Global Technologist, Product Strategy, Veeam Software; Sandeep Bhambure is Vice President and Managing Director, India & SAARC, Veeam Software)