The Unexpected “Benign” Effects of Coronavirus
The global effects of coronavirus is a threat to our wellbeing and even the lives of the most vulnerable. Its virulence is now spreading fast in the business world. Hundreds of billions of dollars, euros and pounds have been wiped off the world’s stock markets; in the U.K., more than £125 billion vanished from the FTSE 100 on March 9.
But the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19) is not only felt in the financial markets. Many industries have been badly affected, particularly transport, logistics and tourism. For others, the disruption has been felt in their supply chain, workforce (if asked to self-isolate at home) and business travel, to name a few.
The question we need to ask ourselves is how we can turn the current unprecedented (and unexpected) global crisis into something positive. Interestingly, the Chinese ideogram for “crisis” is made up of two characters meaning “opportunity” and “danger”.
COVID-19 is transforming work as we know it
- A remote first culture
Many organisations across the world are sending their employees to work from home and, consequently, are revising their existing remote working policies. This is teaching a lesson to business leaders about trust and productivity, and might result in remote working policies becoming widespread post-coronavirus. Only 38% of European companies allowed for such policies prior to the outbreak, according to an IDC survey conducted in December 2018.
A remote first culture will inevitably change communication patterns within and across teams:
- Digital communication will become more personal and enabled with video.
- Virtual meetings across remote workers will have a regular cadence.
- Team communication will be more structured and be supported by context-aware work management and collaboration solutions.
- A new etiquette will be designed dealing with audio/visuals during a conference (e.g., avoiding a baby crying in the background).
This new working environment requires organisations to invest in scalable enterprise-grade productivity and collaboration tools. It’s not surprising that in the last month the share prices of Zoom and other collaboration vendors have experienced sharp increases.
Security will nonetheless remain top of the agenda as polices for remote working are rolled out. We expect security teams to work closely with business leads and HR as they redefine an inherent (by design and by default) security model and relevant policies for the new workstyles. We expect data loss prevention technologies and intelligent policy automation to be widely used as a result.
- A culture of trust and empowerment
Remote working will also require leaders to trust their employees and teams, once and for all, and evolve their leadership style from “command and control” to one of empowerment and trust.
While many principles need to co-exist for a culture of trust to succeed, we believe that an open communication, stating very clearly (and several times) the team goals, individual roles and how each employee makes an impact on the bigger picture, is fundamental.
Business leaders will need to reconfigure teams and assign new roles in times of crisis, but this will be another test of their adaptability and resilience to change in an agile world.
Team performance, and not individuals, will be constantly monitored, and evolving KPIs will be used to positively drive business performance. This is all part of a data-driven culture.
- A sustainability culture
According to the Global Business Travel Association, business travel restrictions are badly hitting the sector. The association estimates the virus is costing the business travel industry $47 billion per month or up to 37% of the industry’s forecast spending this year.
However, and once again, every cloud has a silver lining. A number of forthcoming flagship conferences have been “reimagined” and turned into digital experiences. Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect is an example. The IMF and World Bank are also planning to replace their regular meetings in mid-April in Washington with a virtual format.
While “teleconferencing” will unlikely become the norm post-coronavirus, we expect many organizations to make them a “sustainable” practice, and will therefore review and curb business travel as a result. Air travel only represents 2% of the total human-induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the atmosphere, but the green credentials of every organisation are now under great scrutiny.
Support Your Remote Workers
In summary, it’s in the chaos and disruption created by the coronavirus that a new order will emerge. Every crisis also creates an opportunity. It’s therefore crucial for business leaders to revisit traditional ways of work and experiment with new practices that will help them meet their goals.
We believe that a culture of remote working, empowerment and trust, and sustainability, enabled by relevant technologies, can effectively support companies in the current situation and beyond.
Certainly, the coming months will be a global test for companies and their readiness for the Future of Work. “Adapt or die,” says the old adage.
If you want to learn more about this topic or have any questions, please contact or Angela Salmeron, or head over to drop your details in the form on the top right.
If you want to know more about how COVID-19 will affect industries, read it here:
Cybersecurity Challenges in the Time of the New Coronavirus
The main challenge that enterprises face at the time of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) is to let their employees work from home, causing a cascade of side effects. These range from faulty configurations to a lack of cybersecurity specialists with a sprinkle of increased vulnerability to phishing attacks.
This latest strain of coronavirus has been spreading across the globe since December, causing major disruption in every country where it has appeared.
The blueprint created by the Chinese authorities to tackle the issue is now being adopted in other countries, such as in Italy, where the movements of the entire nation have been restricted, and Greece, where all mass gatherings at theatres, cinemas, museums and sports events have been suspended in several regions.
Apart from the suffering that the virus has brought to many, the main victim of what is now a pandemic is the global economy. The Fed in the US has already cut interest rates, Chinese manufacturing PMI has dropped almost 30%, and investors are fleeing to buy gold.
But where does this leave us from a cybersecurity perspective?
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Brings Cybersecurity Challenges
Because of the virus, millions of workers in China and now in Europe (with the US likely to follow) are being forced to work from home. This is very profitable for UC providers, as everyone is resorting to teleconferencing, but it is also causing unprecedented challenges when it comes to cybersecurity.
Working remotely
Some organisations already let their employees work from home and have VPNs and secure access tools in place. But most enterprises will let their workers access important resources remotely without the proper security infrastructure.
This risk is opening a Pandora’s box of misconfigured databases and excessive use of shadow IT, creating the perfect environment for hackers to strike.
Skills Gap
The cybersecurity industry has faced a crippling skills gap for years now, and there are always more open positions than available specialists to fill them (case in point — the main theme of RSA two weeks ago was the “Human Element”).
This means that cybersecurity teams are already overstretched. Having your IT security team working from home will not affect certain tasks, but if you want your SOC to be effective it needs analysts on site.
If a company has to send its SOC analysts home, its ability to face external threats would be highly diminished. Some enterprises have already put strategies in place to face a pandemic worst-case scenario, but even these would only be able to keep processes going if nothing else goes wrong.
This means that in the case of an attack or a hardware failure, operations might come to a halt with limited chances to remediate in a timely fashion.
New Phishing Threats
Finally, in a crisis, bad actors (both virtual and real) are always ready to strike. It is much easier to scam people by leveraging the fear that a calamity like this causes. In Italy, for example, “government officials” are showing up at people’s homes to “sanitise and sterilise cash as it is a vector for the virus to spread.”
The spread of the coronavirus is creating the perfect ground for widespread phishing campaigns. Employees quarantined at home are more likely to click on suspicious links pushed by a mix of fear, confusion and lack of IT security support.
I am sure that we will see lots of COVID-19 phishing campaigns hitting enterprises that are unprepared and understaffed. These widespread attacks will cause chaos, with long lasting impact on an economy that is already struggling.
To limit the effects of these attacks, organisations should:
- Prioritise the creation of a secure environment for employees to work from home.
- Create disaster recovery policies that can be applied by a skeleton IT security team.
- Stress the importance of employees being extra careful when opening emails.
If you want to learn more about this topic or have any questions, please contact or Claudio Stahnke, or drop your details in the form on the top right.
If you want to know more about how COVID-19 will affect industries, read it here:
Culture of Shock - Working from Home
As we see many organisations now asking staff to work from home as a response to the Coronavirus pandemic it is important to help those people, especially if they are not used to working from their home environment. Can they, for example,
- Assess their technological capability – many people have broadband in their homes, but not all of them necessarily know the speed they get, and the upload/download numbers. Some work from apartments with shared WiFi etc and may get variable speeds depending on the competition for bandwidth around them. How can you help them understand what their options are?
- Manage the expectations around their working arrangements – if you are in a situation where the kids are off school and the rest of the family are around it can be hard to remain focused. Providing some guidance around this tricky area could be extremely valuable.
- Make a judgement about the information security and privacy issues with working in a home environment. Not everyone lives in their own home with their family – some live in shared accommodation with other adults, or can only practically work in common areas. Are they putting your information security policies at risk or potentially exposing your clients’ or staff personal details to prying eyes?
There are many other aspects to a rapid change to working from home that have to be considered, from culture through technology all the way to the management of remote teams. At IDC we have guidance on the technology, the approach and the practical experiences of getting collaboration right. If you would like to get involved in a facilitated discussion with other organisations in this situation, please let me know.
Cardiff Recognized by IDC for Excellence in Sustainable Public Infrastructure
The Welsh Executive and Welsh local councils have embraced a low-carbon pathway. The City of Cardiff is at the forefront of this, with the city’s investments in smart outdoor lighting as part of its environmental sustainability program winning the IDC Europe and Central Asia Smart City Award for Sustainable Public Infrastructure.
Cities Step Up Their “Smart” Maturity
In 2020, 10%–30% of smart city IoT projects will fail to launch or scale due to ill-defined outcomes or KPIs, poor understanding of vendor offerings, or inadequate funding and stakeholder engagement.
Cities have been investing in smart city programs for almost 10 years but have failed to scale pilot projects after encountering governance, technical, and regulatory challenges. But in the past couple of years, many European and Central Asian cities have started to achieve the intended improvements in quality of life, economic prosperity, and resilience.
These cities have made sure that all residents have enjoyed the benefits. They have managed to deliver quick wins in specific use cases and have reused the modular solutions they have built to extend the capabilities across the whole city.
IDC evaluated 53 projects submitted for the IDC Europe and Central Asia Smart City Awards. The projects were scored on six variables:
- Scale of impact across the city
- Governance of innovation
- Ecosystem engagement
- Measurement and monitoring of results
- Adoption of 3rd Platform technologies such as cloud, Big Data, and AI
- Strategic use of data
Cardiff’s Smart Outdoor Lighting Success Story
Streetlighting in Cardiff accounts for 25% of the council’s CO2 emissions. The initial implementation included switching more than 14,000 streetlights to LED to reduce electricity consumption. The solution also enables the city to manage lights from a central lighting management system. City operation managers can remotely adjust the illumination based on time of day, weather, traffic conditions, or events taking place in a public space.
For example, operation managers can turn up the lighting if there is a traffic accident or if a crime has been committed, dim the lights to 30% at night when fewer people are around, or increase light levels at peak times outside schools and hospitals to maximize safety and visibility. The city worked with partners such as Jacobs Engineering, Faithful & Gould, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), and Centre Great Ltd. to implement the project.
Cardiff won the award for a number of reasons, including:
- Reducing electricity consumption by 60% and saving more than £750,000 a year
- Reducing maintenance costs
- Dynamically adjusting illumination during the day or night to enhance safety
- Daytime switching to drastically reduce fault location time for underground supply failures
IDC suggests that other cities trying to replicate this success when investing in similar projects should:
- Collaborate with an ecosystem of partners that bring complementary expertise
- Set up an infrastructure that can scale from smart lighting by adding sensors to monitor noise, traffic, or other applications
If you want to learn more about this topic or have any questions, please contact or Massimiliano Claps, or head over to drop your details in the form on the top right.