It's time to change.

Let's see how much of this is familiar to the organisation that you are in or have been at in the not too distant past:

• Multiple environments on all the time
• Months between releases
• Deployments being done manually requiring step by step instructions which subsequently fail due to human error.
• Finding bugs in production because you have no assurance the same artefact that was tested prior to release, is the same one now in production. Or even worse, no testing at all.
• All staff must work from the office.

Then the world changed due to Covid-19. How many businesses are ensuring that they 'weather the storm' right now, only to return to the same ways of working?

How many interviews have you read or listened to of business leaders, where the question has been 'If you could start again, what would you do?'. Guess what? That time is now, there really is no better time.

I really don't mean to trivialise any of this, it really is a horrible time and there was little warning. But, and this is a big but, what happens to your business now is open to change. Galvanise it as much as you really can. Take it step by step, working from home has become commonplace. Working from home wasn't the easiest transition in a lot of ways (partly for the reasons various industries didn't do it until they had to), but now that it is in place, see the value in it.

• Better work/life balance for employees leading to happier employees
• Flexible working hours
• Easier to employ the right people, regardless of location
• Easier to keep staff due to happiness

From a more technical perspective. I'm a Platform Engineer for AND Digital in Leeds. Whilst that role varies from place to place (and in consultancy work from client to client), in reality I'm a Senior AWS Engineer. I build Infrastructure. I make things work. I get stuff done. Here's an example of a recent project, all written in Terraform:

• Ruby based Web Application running on EC2 with Autoscaling built in, behind a Load Balancer with a HTTPS Certificate from ACM.
• Elasticache Redis for caching.
• S3 bucket secured with KMS.
• PostgreSQL Database on RDS secured with KMS.
• AWS Secrets Manager to avoid passwords in Git Repositories.
• Custom built AMI.

If what you're being asked is 'Why can't this be done from the office?', then that is still the wrong question. Value should come from the quality of output rather than a subjective value of what we can see.