Tag: remote working

As we tackle new COVID-19 variants and witness increasing levels of lockdown still unfolding around the world, the promise of a vaccine has not yet dulled the relentless and destructive march of the Coronavirus, upending many industries.

Agile has become a bit of a buzzword in the last year and for good reason. Agility is key to success in a digitally transforming working world. 'The measure of intelligence is the ability to change,' Einstein once said, and it’s a concept widely recognised by businesses today in conversations about flexibility and agility. But while these terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to two vastly different business capabilities.

Without rapid immunisation, many experts believe that South Africa will experience a third wave of COVID-19 by the coming autumn or winter. Although there is no clear-cut definition of what could constitute this surge it will become evident as we start to observe a continuous rise in new cases. 

Remote work will catalyse a shift from the corporate perimeter concept to micro-office security certification. Outsourcing of IT and cybersecurity functions will be crucial to solve expertise shortages and save budgets. To coordinate managed service providers along with using multiple cloud services, cloud security and management skills will become a ‘must have’.

The lockdown has highlighted the importance of cybersecurity as an integrated business process especially given the normalisation of remote working. While the focus has been on safeguarding employee devices, email security has fallen by the wayside.

Although the strategy of digitisation and digital transformation had loosely formed ‘part’ of organisational growth strategies, it was not until the COVID-19 pandemic - where the entire world was forced to stay, and work from home, that ‘digital’ took centre stage.

While the lifting of international travel restrictions, put in place in early 2020 to curb the spread of COVID-19, would be great news for the travel industry and the wider economy, the move would likely further exacerbate the already critical shortage of cybersecurity skills in South Africa.

It’s universally agreed that one of the most significant changes that have been brought about by the COVID-19 is the shift in the way people will live and work in the years to come. Given that technology and digitisation will be central to this shifting dynamic, the role of data scientists in enabling and informing business strategy has never been bigger or more important.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the shortcomings of South Africa’s connectivity landscape, emphasising the fact that not all areas across the country have access to reliable, fast and stable bandwidth. As companies were forced to rapidly enable their workforces to work from home, it became abundantly clear that not all connectivity is equal.

The past year has seen a surge in cyber attacks, but that doesn’t mean that the worst is over. Not only were global economies ravaged by COVID-19 during 2020, but untold damage was done by cyber hackers, who showed they have no ethics or morals and attacked as many institutions as possible, including hospitals and vaccine manufacturers.