During the global COVID-19 lockdowns, businesses have been forced to adapt their IT systems and infrastructure to accommodate a remote workforce. This has put a strain on human resources and the ability of IT operating systems to cope with more data moving around organisations than ever before.

I recently moderated Datacom’s #RightCloud online panel discussion, in partnership with VMware, on how organisations have and can leverage tools and strategies to minimise IT costs and enable operating expenditure (OPEX) savings. It was a fantastic opportunity to discover more about how different sectors have handled the ongoing pandemic and to be given an insight into how each expert and their company are trying to move forward in trying times.

“There has been an economy-wide downturn in confidence and business activity, as you might expect,” Christina Leung, principal economist at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER), said. “The high degree of uncertainty has led businesses to be more cautious about investment, which is just starting to ease in recent months.”

But there is good news – it seems there is an increased appetite for risk by chief information officers (CIOs). Digital transformation, either always on the horizon or so long ago planned in some organisations, is now happening in a matter of days or weeks. And organisations are reaping the benefits.

One of the biggest hurdles we had to jump was the decision to invest, but the risk of not doing anything was much higher.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” revealed Karl Wright, CIO of Datacom.

“My first priority was to our staff and their safety. We made the call pretty early that staff no longer needed to travel into work to do their job, and, being a managed services business, we had all the tools that we needed to do that.

“It wasn’t easy though. One of the biggest hurdles we had to jump was the decision to invest, but the risk of not doing anything was much higher.

“It seems that the implementation of systems, which might have previously fallen into CAPEX (capital expenditure) or OPEX buckets, are now just being seen as an essential investment, or cashflow, to keep the business running. We saw that as an opportunity to change the way we do business.”

Head of project and digital services at the New Zealand Financial Markets Authority (FMA), Glenn Phillips, also said after keeping its people safe, the flow of data around the organisation was the next concern.

“We’ve never seen such large volumes of data move around the organisation before. Our main concern was security,” revealed Glenn.

”It was our cloud transformation project, supported by Datacom and commenced two years ago, that seriously saved our skins. Everyone already had everything they needed and we were fully cloud-equipped and agile. This meant we were ready to scale and deploy the service to our workforce almost overnight.

“We shut down Friday night and everything was back up and running as if nothing had happened on Monday morning. We are a very different organisation culturally than we were in February, which is definitely a change that’s been supported by our strong IT systems.”

As a government department, the management of data is a primary concern, but Glenn affirmed how the cloud has helped the FMA to be more compliant with the Public Records Act than ever before.

It was our cloud transformation project, supported by Datacom and commenced two years ago, that seriously saved our skins. Everyone already had everything they needed and we were fully cloud-equipped and agile. This meant we were ready to scale and deploy the service to our workforce almost overnight.

Rhys Shannon, director of channels for Asia Pacific Japan at CloudHealth by VMware, also recognised the benefits of the cloud during the pandemic.

“Cloud has met the brief asked of it by businesses during this time of uncertainty. With COVID-19 requiring organisations to adopt remote working policies, cloud-based technology has provided both continuity of access and a consistent user experience (UX) across a broad spectrum of mission-critical applications and services.

“In this climate, effective cloud management practices have continued to provide visibility, governance, and control over cloud-based OPEX. This has also helped build business confidence in the outcomes of ongoing technology investment.”

With organisations then learning how to respond to the economic landscape, what does the future hold?

“New Zealand’s economy and domestic trading certainly took a downturn, almost to the levels of the 2008 market crash,” said Christina. “But we are seeing a V-shaped recovery.

“We are starting to see an improvement in demand as the economy responds to the unprecedented amount of stimulus measures from the government and the Reserve Bank.”

This is can only be good news for business and a silver lining to cloud-based technology.

Katarina is the director and principal for Beam Ideation. Having designed and led the digital transformation of the NSW Government, Katarina is now helping companies bring their great ideas to light, and transform their business models to thrive using co-design and ideation.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Datacom’s point of view.

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