As the impact of coronavirus continues to impact many aspects of the economy, tech and media companies have had to find ways to get their people working from home fast.
As a sector, these businesses had already recognised the value of digitisation pre-pandemic and had plans in place, but some companies were further down the digital transformation path than others. Coronavirus was a wake-up call for businesses at the slower end of the spectrum and a general accelerant to the transformation process.
This unexpected acceleration put pressure on IT departments, particularly to provide a robust and secure infrastructure that could support remote working. Not every employee went into the pandemic with a company laptop that was set up for secure homeworking and shadow IT was a big problem for those without established cloud-based collaboration tools. Unauthorised use of some tools has rocketed as people started using whatever they could get their hands on to keep communicating. As a result of an audit, one leading media firm discovered that its employees were using 6,000 personal collaboration accounts for business.
Full speed ahead on moving to the cloud
Many companies in the tech and media sector have reached a tipping point in their journey to the cloud. Whilst many workloads have moved to public clouds, many legacy systems or bespoke applications still reside on premises. Coronavirus, however, has underlined the benefits of cloud-based agility and is accelerating plans to move more workloads to the cloud. For example, a global technology company we support currently has 46 data centres worldwide but is looking to have no physical data centres of their own by the end of next year.
Staying secure while making this move is essential. In a world of ransomware attacks and nation state actors that may want to steal personal data and intellectual property, tech and media companies see security as a critical point in the network infrastructure of the future. Deploying a cloud access security broker (CASB) service with a leading cyber integrator such as BT is an effective way to mitigate the risks of change and provide ongoing threat mitigation.
The next steps in network infrastructure
This impetus for rapid change is just reaching network infrastructure in the tech and media sector. As the wider economy settles into new ways of working, their next investment priority is the network infrastructure that will allow organisations to reduce physical office space and support secure connections from home. Tech companies in particular, are haunted by the salutary tale of Kodak losing its relevance and market share because it didn’t move with technology developments.
This bright future will be built on a network solution that’s more secure, software defined, global and data focussed, not to mention more efficient and cost-effective. The sector is open to the possibilities of new, software-defined services that can deliver outstanding experience for complex, business critical applications. Additionally, greater bandwidth and better connectivity will support development, production and sales teams with efficient and secure collaboration, helping tech and media businesses to forge ahead.
It takes more than tech to shape a global network
BT has a wealth of experience in network transformations and in developing software-defined solutions. We’ve delivered thousands of solutions globally with our ever-increasing choice of secure services and solutions. During the pandemic, we helped customers across every sector extend bandwidth to support the move to homeworking securely – often in a matter of hours.
Our approach means that multiple technologies and legacy systems can be easily managed to create a single, secure global network infrastructure for your business. Through our broad portfolio of solutions, we can easily integrate with the collaboration applications, data and third-party cloud providers you need globally. Then our end-to-end management of your entire solution simplifies operations for you – and improves user experience for your team and your customers.
Most importantly, we’re constantly updating our solutions, so as you move into a software-defined world, your solution is guaranteed to evolve with you.
Get in touch or read ‘Shape your future infrastructure: A proposal’ for more detailed information on how we can guide your transformation.
