What Has the Pandemic Taught Us About Business Resiliency?

The COVID-19 pandemic put disaster recovery plans to the test. It globally affected nearly every aspect of an organization in a concentrated amount of time. Organizations that had strong disaster preparedness plans and an agile IT infrastructure in place fared better than those that did not. To better position their companies against continuing disruptions, C-suite executives have sharpened their focus on strategies that build resiliency.

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• Acceleration of plans to migrate network assets to the cloud
• Adoption of machine learning, AI and automation to improve resiliency and business efficiency.
• Transition to a largely remote workforce
• Reduction in the amount of real estate and other assets related to operating expenses
• Capture of market share by adapting to the demands of a contactless economy
• Staffing of hard-to-fill strategic positions from a wider and geographically diverse
candidate pool

C-suite executives understand that leveraging new technologies can help their companies respond more agilely as market forces change. The hope is that the need for speed in transitioning to cloud-based networks will produce long-term benefits in faster time to market for revenue-generating services and applications, improved customer experiences and more robust support for critical business operations.

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Planning for Disruptions

The swift impact on business operations caused by the pandemic drew the C-suite’s attention to hidden vulnerabilities. Survey responses revealed that executives have moved quickly to build resiliencies into their organizations with an eye toward long-term results.

Key measures are focused on:
• Increasing market share
• Seeking new revenue streams
• Advancing network infrastructure to better support remote operations
• Improving the customer experience

Moving to the Cloud

Organizations look to cloud service providers for network infrastructures that enable more agile responses to customer needs and deliver high availability and network performance while reducing operational costs.

The respondents anticipated that only 16% of their organizations’ infrastructure
and applications will be hosted on-premise in 2021–2022.