Breaking down the walls

The impact of Covid-19 on the work environment is unprecedented.

Almost overnight, millions of us transitioned to working from home – and we were the lucky ones. Restrictions on the movement of people and physical interaction have had enormous impact on those who have to have a physical or hands-on presence to go about their business.

There are the obvious examples such as pubs, restaurants and hairdressers. Then there are the less obvious, which include software houses.

It’s amazing, but I assure you – it’s true; some software houses have to physically have a team onsite at a client’s premises in order to access their mainframe and implement whatever their particular project involves. In the early days of lockdown, you can imagine the disruption this caused to their implementation timeline – not what the client needed, I’m sure, on top of the challenge they faced to get their own teams fully operational from their kitchen or spare bedroom.

For those of us who live in the Cloud, it wasn’t a problem. The team at Genasys carried on, business as usual, and successfully delivered four projects for clients around the world during the peak of lockdown – on time, on budget – without having to leave our respective homes.

The pandemic has exposed the physical limitations of many IT infrastructures in many businesses in many industries, insurance being one of them. It’s just surprising that it also exposed the limitations amongst some that you would have expected not to be reliant on having to knock on a physical door.

It begs the question, why on earth do you need to get inside bricks and mortar if you can live in the cloud?