How has coronavirus impacted business IT?

The ongoing coronavirus crisis has plunged the world into chaos, with global lockdowns forcing many businesses to rapidly reorganise their strategies around remote working and cloud infrastructure. Organisations have had to assess and deploy collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom, G Suite and Microsoft Teams, as well as virtual desktop infrastructure systems and remote devices like laptops from which to access them. For many, this represents the first time they’ve experimented with remote working in a major way, and the learning curve can be steep.

Businesses have been forced to strike a balance between outfitting staff with the tools they need to be productive while still keeping costs manageable, at a time when revenues are becoming increasingly uncertain. These changing revenues – particularly in sectors such as retail, travel and hospitality – have forced companies to pivot to digital revenue streams, which require significant IT involvement to develop and optimise.

Infrastructure has also been subject to great change. Those with on-premise data centres have had to explore ways to remotely manage those systems, and many have opted to simply accelerate their cloud migration plans, shifting existing workloads into the cloud en masse. This represents a massive sea change for a great deal of companies, but many line-of-business departments within organisations are proactively exploring ways that cloud tools can help support their roles in this new world.

One of the key questions raised by this pandemic is how many of these rapid and fundamental changes will carry over to the post-COVID business landscape. For example, how significant a change would the continuation of widespread remote working be for the business community to adjust to? How would companies have to adjust in areas like security, videoconferencing and remote device management?

To find out more about the impact that coronavirus has had on business IT, and how IT professionals are adapting to the changes, check out the video above, presented by IT Pro in association with IBM. You can also sign up to IBM’s webinar on scaling your desktops and apps with VMware Horizon on IBM Cloud for more insights into how to make your business more resilient to the ongoing situation.