The New Normal Is Anything But

The people have voted – remote work is here to stay.

Once relegated to a commute and cubicle, many employees are opting for the comfort of their home office – saving time, mileage, and even money previously spent on business casual clothes. A more flexible workstyle for the future.

For many employees, this is the new normal, but for IT professionals, it is anything but.

While people previously worked remotely, this is a new persona and experience IT must accommodate – from offering a self-service approach to onboarding and providing help desk support.

But it is so much more than that. We recently caught up with some of our customers to discuss this during one of our Coffee Talk sessions. Here are just a few of the highlights they shared with us:

First, IT leaders are reprioritizing investments to support this new normal and introducing more collaboration applications and security tools to enable employees to be productive while still maintaining the organization’s security posture and network reliability. This includes focusing on home network coverage, VPN upgrades, and other endpoint solutions to prevent the new wave attacks from hackers and bad actors.

Additionally, in the rush to support these new needs at the start of the pandemic, many companies may have cut some corners in rolling out new applications without the previously used end-to-end security checks. As a result, IT and security professionals are now taxed with resecuring apps and updating usage policies. On the plus side, this effort proved that it is possible to launch critical applications that can be quickly and widely adopted, if necessary.

Last, but not least, many IT departments have increased their focus on their teams. Not just due to the intensity of the last few years or the Great Resignation, but to be even better prepared for anything that may arise in the future. By digitizing their IT workflows, companies can forgo the in-person war rooms because the root cause analysis, handoffs, and response is now determined in advance. This will enable IT teams to build on this foundation in the future. In addition to looking for ways to maintain its culture in the absence of in-person interaction, CIOs and IT professionals have also increased their contingency planning to reduce in-person dependencies and revisit single-thread skillsets.

As our Coffee Talk conversation came to a close, I couldn’t help but have a newfound appreciation for our colleagues in IT. Two years ago, we were thrust into something unexpected. And while we may have had to quickly adjust the functional tasks and processes we did in-person, our IT teammates had to support us all. They were and remain our selfless unsung heroes.

Thank you for doing what you do every day to make us all successful.