Don’t Stop Now

As we all watch this health crisis continue around the world, and dread the economic price we are paying, it is perhaps not easy to move beyond the present. Yet, as we take steps to reopen the economy, we need to think not just about the current implications for our businesses, but also how to use the present situation as an opportunity to prepare for the future. The premium on resilience and agility is clear, and two things seem paramount to enabling this: continued digital transformation and strong trusted relationships.

Recently I had a number of opportunities to speak with Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and heads of information security (CISOs) in big multinational companies (Global 1000), and came away with a few overall impressions about economic impact, remote working and cybersecurity, which I share below. I also came away with some thoughts about what we need to do to help ourselves for the future.

While businesses in all sectors of the economy have been impacted by the coronavirus, the level and direction of this impact is very industry-dependent. Not surprisingly, the determinative factor on the demand side is how central the business in question is to daily life and as such to supplies or services that are still moving under quarantine. Some observations:

• Online sales for retailers (ecommerce) are markedly up, not just as a percentage of sales, but also well up over the same period last year. This will likely continue.

• Companies are uniformly thankful for the investments they made in their IT and communications infrastructure in recent years. Remote working is generally functioning well, despite anywhere from a 3x to 7x increase in people connecting remotely! VPNs and the public internet have held up remarkably well.

• Interestingly, ensuring anyone who needs it has a reasonable, secure end-point device and screen at home has been a bigger challenge than securing sufficient bandwidth. Some businesses collected their office desktops and delivered them to their employees’ homes.

• Phishing attempts are up as bad actors seek to take advantage of any vulnerabilities arising from the rapid switch to working from home. Targeted malware has been embedded in Covid-19 communications, taking advantage of people’s hunger for information.

• One of the biggest issues facing CISOs as they try to protect their enterprises is the decrease in visibility. Since much activity is taking place outside the four walls of the company, even outside the network, traditional network monitoring is not enough. As a result, end-point security is gaining in importance, as is the need to monitor cloud services. Some of the discipline regarding security and privacy in the workplace is understandably gone too, what with work occurring at the kitchen table, making it more difficult to secure sensitive information.

These dialogues got me thinking about a number of things. High among them was the reflection that whether we like it or not, we are all highly interdependent. Even more than we thought. Companies, countries, people. Even the biggest of companies cannot do much alone. But more than this, where would we be without digital capabilities? Can you imagine the economic standstill we would be experiencing now if it weren’t for the last 25 years of development in information technology — particularly the last 10? The investments made in digital are saving us, allowing many to continue working, making decisions and keeping the wheels of enterprise turning. Technology investments have delivered, but equally importantly, this crisis forced a giant leap forward in human willingness to adapt and adopt. Unable to work any other way, employees of all types have adapted to the circumstances, giving the digital transformation of many companies a push forward. The same is true of investments in information security, perhaps especially the investments made in both tools as well as awareness and education of employees and management.

The question now is really what we will do with this push. In my view, we should be exploiting this occasion to maintain forward momentum on all fronts. Digital literacy has climbed a great deal in the current crisis, and we should take advantage of the opportunity to give our people the chance to document and fully implement creative, makeshift workarounds that are actually better than the original work method. Coming out of this pandemic, we need to keep investing in digital transformation. Not just in infrastructure, but in rethinking processes and using the flexibility afforded by digital to build agility and resilience of all types. In the end, digital transformation is not so much about technology as it is about people and ways of working. “Doing” agile is a way of developing software, but “being” agile is what we should really be striving for. Equally important, we need to keep investing in cyber security, learning from the experience of the last two months and educating our workforce on how to keep information secure even in difficult circumstances.

In many ways, this pandemic has ripped off the band aid and exposed the wound...and the patient is doing better than we thought. Now we need to use the crisis to rethink how we work and with whom. It would be entirely too easy to fall back into our old patterns when the immediate emergency dies down — and to shrink digital investments in an effort to preserve cash and help bottom lines. But it is vital we don’t. Instead, the key is not just to take advantage of what we’ve learned for our medium and long-term future, but also for our immediate future if we have to face a second round of Covid-19 in six months. This is not a time to hit the brakes, but rather a time to step on the digital gas pedal.

In the same vein, it would be easy to step back from the complications of global vendor and partner relationships, whether under the guise of economic expediency (or worse, political nationalism). Sure, some rationalization of external relationships may be necessary, and as we emerge from this crisis each company should consider what the needs of its customers will be and position itself to serve them. However, a solid relationship based on trust is always valuable, and now is the time to demonstrate just that and continue to build on strong bonds. This is especially important at this time, because as economies open back up, one of the chief vulnerabilities of big companies will center on their supply chains. Just as we won’t be returning to a pre-digital age, neither are we returning to a time where we’re resilient on our own and not deeply interdependent with others. Global 1000 companies that use this opportunity to help smaller and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) get back on their feet are not just making an altruistic move that will save jobs and support the world economy. They are also making a smart business move that will help them regain their own full ability to serve their customers more quickly, while strengthening relationships that may get them through the next crisis.