As we explained previously, 2020 has been unprecedented. Covid-19 has caused problems internationally, both for people’s health and their ability to work and provide for their families. Business owners have been doing everything within their power to continue trading whilst adhering to ever-changing government rules. Some made a full transition to remote working, others partial, and some continued trading on-premise at a limited capacity. There were, however, many businesses that did not make it through this most difficult of years. To be sure your business does not follow suit, we will now ..read more

2020, a year that most want to forget! With Covid-19 came one of the worst health epidemics of modern times, which forced a shift in the way we work practically overnight. Bosses that are usually organised and prepared were struck with urgent business-defining decisions on a regular basis. Work practices became a struggle and the focus shifted to a ‘muddle through’ mentality with no one knowing what the rules would be from day to day. Lockdowns and constant tier changes made it impossible to plan for the future, or so people thought. In this blog series, we will highlight some of the issues ..read more

One of the unexpected silver linings to the global coronavirus crisis has been the rapid growth the cloud industry has enjoyed. The shift to remote working during the various lockdowns that have taken place over the course of 2020, was largely, if not entirely, facilitated by cloud services. This has meant that while other sectors have struggled and there has been an overall economic downturn, cloud companies have performed relatively well financially. Although they wouldn’t want to characterise the past few months as profiting from the pandemic, the likes of Zoom and Microsoft Teams have sur ..read more

Twitter has been fined over half a million dollars for violating European Union data protection laws in the first EU-wide privacy case. The EU’s chief data watchdog today announced that it has issued an administrative fine of 450,000 euros ($547,000) to the social media titan for being too slow to notify Android phone users located across the EU of a data breach that threatened their privacy. A further finding of the investigation into the breach by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) was that Twitter failed to adequately document the security incident. The DPC’s investi ..read more

Spotify has been forced to issue a password reset for users after admitting that their information was exposed to some of the firm’s third-party business partners. The music streaming giant said in a customer data breach notification sent to the California attorney general that the privacy snafu was only discovered and fixed after seven months. “On Thursday November 12, Spotify discovered a vulnerability in our system that inadvertently exposed your Spotify account registration information, which may have included email address, your preferred display name, password, gender, and date of ..read more

Square Enix shifting to permanent remote work makes the transition seem inevitable, but it needs to be embraced for the right reasons This week, Square Enix’s Japanese operations announced that the remote working arrangements put into place to cope with COVID-19 are being made permanent. It’s unlikely that this will be the last such announcement; many companies around the industry are grappling with the question of what to do regarding remote work, and what the “new normal” after the pandemic will actually look like. Many employees will be happy to see game companies starting to take this kin ..read more

The world has seemed a better place lately, with improved optimism around an effective Covid vaccine. As one expert commented, we are not out of the woods yet but it seems like we are on the right path. What is becoming more apparent, though, is that, while firms are looking at their return to office plans as various lockdowns come to an end, a pre-March 2020 working environment for the majority in the financial services world is very unlikely. Discussions we have had over recent weeks indicate most businesses are looking at a hybrid approach, with staff spending two to three days in the offi ..read more

The pandemic has changed so much about our lives, including how we work. COVID-19 forced companies to switch to remote working quickly, but as more and more people work from home for more extended periods, many believe it will become the new normal for the way work gets done. A study by global digital consultancy Publicis Sapient found that remote workers want the flexibility to work from home in some capacity even after offices reopen. Close to 40% of US respondents said they’d prefer to work remotely full-time, and only 16% said they would want to go into the office every day. But even with ..read more

Companies around the globe had to quickly adjust to a new kind of work environment when the Covid-19 pandemic forced a massive shift to remote work. Several months later, organisations and employees around the world are still adjusting to remote and hybrid work business models. In addition to the personal and organisational adjustments that must be made, IT strategies have also been forced to make adjustments.   Adjusting to the hybrid workforce A recent Gallup poll reported that 59% of US workers would like to continue working from home “as much as possible” after the pandemic subsides ..read more

When it comes to effectively managing a multicloud environment, there are a ton of network and application metrics that enterprise customers should be watching. Among enterprises, the trend is toward multicloud environments, which can include workloads running on-premises and in public clouds run by multiple cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM/Red Hat, Google Cloud Platform and others. Gartner predicts by 2021, more than 75% of midsize and large organizations will have adopted some form of a multicloud and/or hybrid IT strategy. Likewise, IDC predicts that by 2022, more than 90 ..read more