Learning from a momentous year

A lot’s been written about how 2020’s been an extraordinary year but looking back I’m not sure we can truly comprehend the momentous nature of what happened.

From a personal perspective, it’s been a complete change of pace from my past 20 years in this industry. Just on a superficial level, this is probably the first time that I’ve not travelled more than 100,000km over the course of a year. I’ve also had to adapt my management style to ensure that the open-door policy that I’ve always embraced works just as well in the virtual world as it does in the real world. That means taking the time to read, understand and reply to all the mails I get from our team members across the world.

2020 has also been a year where we’ve had to adapt quickly to the changing needs of our clients. There’s been a lot of talk about companies squeezing three years of digital transformation into three months and it’s not an exaggeration.

The wholesale implementation of remote working has meant that companies have not only had to ensure that their employees can securely connect to their applications and their data. Clients have had to reprioritize their budgets to ensure that their technology can adequately meet their immediate needs. A lot of the time this meant they needed to pick solutions that could be deployed quickly, and this required moving some of their security to the cloud.

A quick switch to the cloud

The ‘forced’ adoption of cloud-based security services has resulted in a significant mindset change among many organizations as they realize the benefits the new model offers. This is something that companies born in the cloud have long known but more traditional organizations are now moving quickly to adopt this model.

We’re also seeing companies looking to harness managed services and automation to ensure they can stay ahead of the curve and this is something that we’ve been investing a lot of time and effort in building. We’re harnessing the inherent competitive nature of our employees to find solutions to problems our clients don’t even know exist, keeping them at the forefront of innovation.

While organizations have had to move fast to support new ways of working, they’ve also been facing down an increase in the volume and sophistication of attacks from cyber-criminals. These highly organized, syndicated attacks were quick to exploit the fear and confusion created by the pandemic.

What has been a massive, positive development is the more aggressive stance the industry has taken towards combatting cyber-criminals. This year, we saw a coalition of companies, led by Microsoft, going to court to target the infrastructure leveraged by cyber-criminals. I fully expect that this is going to be a more regular occurrence in the future as the industry tries to wrestle back the initiative in the cyber-security space.

I expect that 2021 will see a return to some sort of normal life as global strategies to combat COVID-19 – including access to effective vaccines – start paying off, but we’re not going back to the way things were before. The new workforce is going to be a combination of office-based and remote workers and security infrastructure will have to cater for that. The home network will, for a foreseeable future, be part of the enterprise, and new strategies will need to be designed to ensure that IT teams can secure and manage them.

We’re also going to have to see how team dynamics adapt to the new environment. I’m already wondering if we’ll go back to the good old fashioned Aussie handshake or whether some new way of greeting will emerge as the preferred option.