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Effects of Forced Digital – Webinar Highlight
2020 was a big wake-up call for most businesses. It's time to set ourselves up for long-term resilience after experiencing these main trends over the last year.
Uprise CTO Brian Gagnon held a live webinar to discuss the top IT threats and opportunities in 2021 for business leaders. He discussed top information technology trends affecting business performance and critical steps you can take to ensure business continuity and productivity.
2020 was a big wake-up call for most businesses. It's time to set ourselves up for long-term resilience after experiencing these main trends over the last year.
Forced Digital
Before COVID, 87% of businesses know they would be digitally disrupted, but only 44% felt their company was transforming quickly enough. Now, most CEOs (77%!) have rapidly accelerated their digital transformation efforts.
Any business that had to go from working in-office to remote felt this strain. Unless you started your business in the last few years, you likely had an architecture that didn't support a remote workforce from a performance and security standpoint.
Mostly Remote Workforce
66% of the workforce is now remote. Up from 12% pre-COVID. We've seen many big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon say they want to maintain a strong work-from-home policy.
However, many employees want to go to the office because they miss in-person collaboration, and we all are suffering from Zoom fatigue. It's most likely that we'll see a hybrid approach in the future that requires flexibility.
Increased Security Threats
Before COVID, threats existed within the corporate firewalls, devices, software controls, and IT infrastructure.
Since we have many people working from home, we have increased reliance on home networking, work anywhere on any device, shadow IT, and businesses new to dispersed IT. This leads to a lack of security and control.
47% of SMBs don't understand how to protect their organizations' IT, while security threats increase.
The bottom line is, we need to expect change.
If you want to see the entire webinar, you can view the recording here.
Let us know if you have any questions.
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Uprise Partners was proud to collaborate with the University of New England College of Business on this year’s Spark Series event: The Business of Cyber Defense: How Leaders Prepare for and Recover from Cyber threats. As a company deeply committed to helping organizations strengthen their cybersecurity posture, we were honored to help bring together business leaders, educators, and cybersecurity experts for this important conversation.
