Post-COVID Predictions: Network Connectivity

When we asked our teams to take their work home in March, we had no idea how they would connect to the Internet. We weren’t sure whether they had broadband or DSL or whether they had 100 devices connected to a 10-year old router. More importantly, we had zero information on how secure our peoples’ connections would be. Mark my words, these connectivity challenges will give birth to a new generation of network monitoring and security solutions that are available to every size of company.

At the beginning of COVID-19, many of our customers dealt with their network connectivity challenges with connection surveys or by installing software locally to monitor traffic volumes and bandwidth levels. Unfortunately, as workforces continued to pile online and the entire world started streaming Tiger King, MOS scores plummeted and glitches ran rampant across video calls and web meetings.

In the remote workplace of the future, household broadband and public WiFi connections will no longer cut it. In the near-term, I predict we’ll see rising adoption of solutions like virtual private networks (VPNs), smart-routing and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solutions. Solutions like these enable organizations to take advantage of the convenience and affordability of public networks while leveraging the security and availability of private connections and the cloud. The result? Reliable connectivity options in the face of business continuity threats like COVID-19.

Here’s another prediction that’s loosely related to connectivity: Password protection. Hacking passwords and sending phishing emails have long been tried-and-true hacking tactics, and COVID-19 gave rise to a slew of new techniques and scams. As we move forward, I see many IT leaders exerting greater control over their remote workforce’s password usage. Tools like LastPass and Zoho Vault may become mainstays of the enterprise tech stack.

That’s it for my connectivity/security predictions but stay tuned for my predictions for post-COVID-19 leadership and management trends.

More post-COVID predictions:

• Part-1 Workplace collaboration