2020 has been a year of great change and uncertainty for our customers and indeed, the entire world. Seemingly overnight, organizations have had to quickly pivot to deal with the challenges of the global pandemic and at the same time, every operating model—from supply chains and service delivery to go-to-market and crisis management—has been put to the test.
But with change and uncertainty comes opportunity. Forward-thinking business and IT leaders have already begun to reevaluate their strategies, carefully balancing the need to manage expenses during the crisis with making investments that will drive post-COVID growth and position their organizations for future advantage. According to a worldwide CIO survey, there are three critical CEO priorities that have emerged:
1. Accelerating digital transformation
Prior to the pandemic, most organizations were on a steady and carefully planned digital transformation journey. They were adopting cloud services (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS) and making investments in mobile capabilities and technologies such as AI, ML, IoT, and Big Data to spur digital innovation. But in a world where the vast majority of interactions are now virtual, there is an acute and immediate need to fast-track digitization to not only survive the crisis but to ensure long-term relevance.
2. Enabling work-from-anywhere models
While the requirement to work from home will eventually be lifted, many organizations are planning to continue and even expand remote working models. Employers have realized that there are many benefits to remote work—cost savings, employee retention, talent acquisition—and that with the right set of tools and technologies, remote workers can be just as productive as their in-office counterparts. As a result, the office of the future will be increasingly hybrid, enabling employees to work and collaborate both virtually and physically anytime, anywhere.
3. Strengthening operational resilience
Operational resilience is a new imperative for organizations that struggled to uphold acceptable service levels when the pandemic hit. Times now demand a sharp focus on ensuring critical systems, applications and infrastructure are secure, accessible and performant for all end users regardless of where they are located or how they choose to connect. Redesigning operations to be more intelligent, automated and adaptive is the only way organizations can truly prepare for future waves of disruption.
Preparing for what’s next, now
CIOs and their teams play a vital role in helping their organizations address these priorities. But to ensure success, they must overcome the challenges of insufficient visibility, unpredictable network and application performance, and expanded cybersecurity risks—all while improving their ability to be agile and resilient to ever-changing conditions.
Riverbed is on a mission to help IT teams conquer these challenges. On November 17, 2020, we’ll be hosting the Riverbed Global User Conference 2020, a one-day virtual event, that will equip technology professionals and IT practitioners with the essential capabilities and how-to advice they need to maximize performance and visibility of any network for any application to all users, anywhere.
I hope you will join us for a day of inspiration, exploration and learning alongside your peers, industry leaders and technology experts. Registration is free and open now.
UPDATE: All Riverbed User Conference materials are now available on-demand here.