| | November 20209CIOReviewBRING THE OFFICE EXPERIENCE HOME. We could have seen some of the challenges that companies faced in the early days of COVID-19 coming from a mile away. Undertaken over the past 30 months, my company's IT transformation was not done in preparation for 99 percent of our global workforce to transition to working from home, but one of our guiding philosophies was to set up our employees to work productively from anywhere. This meant we had already completely replaced our virtual private network (VPN) and improved bandwidth globally, moving from a hub-and-spoke private network model to an internet-based model--increasing the total internet capacity of our company ten-fold. Companies today will need to continue investing in what I call this quality-of-life-at-work model. This also means treating home setups with the same care as office setups; working a day from home with sub-adequate technology is okay, but doing so for six weeks or six months can have a significant impact on productivity. And different roles require different setups--i.e., we now know that our customer service agents need at least two computer screens.PICK A COLLABORATION TOOL THAT WORKS NOW WHILE CONTINUALLY TESTING OTHER TOOLS THAT MAY ENABLE FUTURE PRODUCTIVITY. Besides adopting a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), if you haven't already, consider bringing in an end-to-end collaboration solution to your employees' homes, for example, by implementing the G Suite platform. This suite provides tools like Google Jamboard, a virtual whiteboard that you can connect to from a phone, a PC, or even in a conference room on a physical jam board. And of course, video calls are critical for collaboration: My company has tripled the use of Google Meet so that we're now doing roughly 15,000 video conference meetings a week via Google. And most of us opt to have our camera on, which makes the experience far more engaging.TAKE A CLOUD-FIRST APPROACH.The cloud has enabled the kind of internal applications that people need to do their jobs from home. Salesforce, for example, has greatly increased the efficiencies of our customer service team. And though we still have physical data centers, we have plans to reduce them dramatically. Prior to the pandemic, my company moved to a software-defined network (SDN), as opposed to the traditional private networks which cost a fortune and were precluding us from doing the things that we wanted to do from a cloud Perspective.LOOK TOWARD A SECURE FUTURE.We can no longer assume that the four walls of a building protect us because we're not. Though information security has long been top of mind for CIOs, companies today have to make sure they're thinking about it in terms of an ongoing remote working environment and the regulatory requirements that govern it. We use Okta Single Sign-on, MobileIron, and Google Authenticator, which are great security tools and recommend that you look into providing something similar.Our industry has been talking about how to future-proof and crisis-proof companies for years. Now, it's time for us to act, the future has become now. Though information security has long been top of mind for CIOs, companies today have to make sure they're thinking about it in terms of an ongoing remote working environment and the regulatory requirements that govern it
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